Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations

Hummel, Abraham H., 1849-1926Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.8
Word count
448K words
Chapters
45

Tags

English Originals Documentary Literature City TemptationsSuspense ThrillerUrban RomanceHuman NatureCriminal PsychologySocial CritiqueCautionary TaleMoral DilemmaDocumentary NarrativeSocial Observation

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations by Howe and HummelAuthor: Hummel, Abraham H., 1849-1926,Language: English, Class: HV: Social sciences: Social pathology, Social and Public Welfare, Release Date: Feb 29, 2008

Editor's review

Co-authored by Howe and Hummel—the latter a prominent nineteenth-century New York lawyer—this book draws on real cases to expose the frauds, temptations, and criminal methods of the great city. Its value lies not in literary polish but in the immediacy of social and legal history: readers see how urban crime was organized and prosecuted, and how the courts and public opinion of the day interacted. The narration adopts the sensational tone of old newspapers, with densely packed case details; it suits readers interested in urban history, criminology, and the social history of law as a sourcebook. Read it in the context of late nineteenth-century New York, attending both to the stories and to the author’s standpoint as a lawyer and his selective telling. The electronic edition is a free public-domain resource, convenient for searching and excerpting, but note the differences between the original language and values and those of today.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the table of contents and preface first to understand the author’s identity as a lawyer and the book’s background, then move on to the cases.
  2. Select chapters by theme rather than reading straight through; take notes alongside New York urban history sources.
  3. Where passages reflect clearly different values, mark them and distinguish historical information from the author’s judgments.
  4. If using it for writing, record original page numbers or chapter locations when excerpting, for easy verification.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45

FAQ

Is this book a novel or a record of real cases? It is based on real city cases and the author’s observations, with a documentary and exposé character, but the narration has been organized and shaped; read it as a popular historical source rather than a strict academic archive.
The old English edition is hard going—what can help? First read chapter titles and opening and closing paragraphs to grasp the gist, then use a dictionary for key legal and urban terms; you need not read word by word—focus on the course of cases and the author’s commentary.
Is it suitable for researching the history of New York justice? It can serve as supplementary material, offering a lawyer’s perspective and case details of the time; but compare it with official archives and scholarly research, and avoid drawing conclusions from a single narrative.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Hummel, Abraham H., 1849-1926 Author · 1849–1926

Hummel, Abraham H. (1849–1926) was an English-language author about whose life very little is known; public sources are limited, and his early years, education, and professional background cannot be reliably established. What can be confirmed is that he left one work, Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations, and that a single title by him is held in this collection. Judging from its title, the book takes danger as its theme and claims to be a true history of a great city's temptations and snares; its subject matter appears to be urban social realism or cautionary narrative, concerned with the frauds and moral risks lurking in city life. Writing of this kind was not uncommon in English-language publishing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often addressed to general readers and combining exposure with admonition. Given the scarcity of sources, the book's publication details, contents, and contemporary influence remain to be verified, and no further conclusions about the author's life should be drawn from it.