Yes, point VERY well taken. After seeing the initial
reference to archaeological work on Five Points in
Anbinder's book, I was encouraged. Oh well, so much
for that.
It has struck me as curious, in the first few
chapters, how he argues that the Victorian myth was
indeed hyperbole--yet his evidence *is* just that.
Since I'm not familiar with the archaeological
evidence and didn't know of Anbinder's choice to
ignore it, I wondered if he just felt stuck with the
documentary evidence he had (Victorian hyperbole). But
no--the myth still sells. Anyone can get sucked into
engrossing stories--but it's also time to read the
back issues of Historical Archaeology and other Five
Points literature!!
Carolyn
--- "Mary C. Beaudry" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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]
__________________________________________________
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