Hello, all,

I've been off the list for months and was a bit surprised to find the first
message I received upon setting my account back to Receive Mail to be part of a
string on the recent film Gangs of New York.  I watched the History Channel
"History vs. Hollywood" program the other night and was exceedingly depressed by
it.  I know that Rebecca Yamin did very generously share data with Tyler
Anbinder, but he chose to ignore both the messages arising from the results of
Becky's work and the insights of historians like Alan Mayne who have published
at length about the 19th-century construction of myths about urban slums.  But
Anbinder has clearly made a commercial success out of sticking to the myth of
the filthy, violent, thug-ridden slum of Five Points because the true story or
stories as pieced together by Becky & the John Milner team in their seven-volume
series of reports and special issue of Historical Archaeology and many, many
other articles in books and journals just isn't as sexy as the sensationalized
version of Five Points that Anbinder has purveyed so successfully.

What is of interest in a big-picture (by this I do not mean movie as I do not as
a rule go to movies of any sort, Hollywood or otherwise) sort of way is that
contemporary society seems to have as great a need for slum mythologies as did
our Victorian predecessors, and that some historians are happy to play to this
need by making selective and purposeful use of the evidence.  How do
archaeologists combat this sort of thing?

In England Tony Blair's government is planning to demolish some 75,000 units of
terraced housing in the northwest of England alone (the total number of
working-class housing units slated from demolition country-wide is staggering),
using very much the sort of stereotype, promoted by Anbinder and subjected to
considerable involution by Scorsese, of the unsavory nature of working-class
neighborhoods as breeding grounds not just for genuine diseases but any number
of social ills as well.

Here is a good example of why archaeologists need to promulgate their work
beyond the boundaries of the discipline itself, and, to paraphrase Randy McGuire
re his work on the Ludlow Massacre site in Colorado, of their obligation to use
their findings to promote social action in the present.  I do not see the the
reification of 19th-century stereotypes of urban places and of the lives of
immigrants through a highly fictionalized and over-promoted Hollywood
blockbuster as a harmless form of mass entertainment.  Nor can I be in any way
pleased by the trivialization and marginalization of Rebecca Yamin's more fully
limned version of the history of the Five Points.

Your freshly radicalized,
Mary B.

Mary C. Beaudry, PhD, RPA
Department of Archaeology
Boston University
675 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02215 USA
tel. 617-358-1650
email:  [log in to unmask]