Cause for Alarm

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Description

Though central to the social, political, and cultural life of the nineteenth-century city, the urban volunteer fire department has however been largely ignored by historians. Redressing this neglect, Amy Greenberg reveals the meaning of this central institution by comparing the fire departments of Baltimore, St. Louis, and San Francisco from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Volunteer fire companies secure highly flammable cities from fire and provided many men with friendship, brotherhood, and a way to prove their civic virtue. Even as other scholars have claimed that fire companies were primarily working class, Greenberg shows that they were in reality mixed social groups: merchants and working men, immigrants and native-born–all found a common identity as firemen. Cause for Alarm presents a new vision of urban culture, one defined not by class but by gender. Volunteer firefighting united men in a shared masculine celebration of strength and bravery, skill and appearance. In an in a different way alienating environment, fire companies provided men from all walks of life with status, community, and an outlet for competition, which now and again even led to elaborate brawls.

While this culture was once fully respected in the early nineteenth century, changing social norms eventually demonized the firemen’s vision of masculinity. Greenberg assesses the legitimacy of accusations of violence and political corruption against the firemen in each city, and places the municipalization of firefighting in the context of urban social change, new ideals of citizenship, the rapid spread of fire insurance, and new firefighting technologies.

Originally published in 1998.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the recent print-on-demand technology to again make to be had up to now out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books Even as presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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