Dreamers Rise

"Sometime in March last, a gentleman who lives in Portsmouth N. H., being on a visit to Boston, was induced by a friend of this city, t...

Over the years I've devoted several posts to the colorful early history of Manhattan's Water Street Mission, an institutio...

Charles Wesley, one of the founding fathers of Methodism, is said to have penned some 6,500 hymns, among them "Hark, the Herald Ange...

In the 1850s, the Five Points area in lower Manhattan, a now obliterated slum occupying the area adjoining what is now the Foley Square dist...

Me father was a counterfeiter, and ran away from justice before I can remember him. There was a lot of us, and they put me with me grandm...

"Novel reading has been fearfully on the increase during the last fifteen or twenty years, and especially in the last ten years; and ...

This little leaflet is just one example of the countless inexpensive evangelical tracts that have been printed and distributed over the ye...

This little "Manual of the Water Street Mission" in New York City was published in 1880, and seems to have served both as an int...

The first snows of December haven't yet fallen on the dirty streets of lower Manhattan, but already there's a chill in the air. Th...

This postcard of the Connecticut River at Greenfield, Massachusetts was postmarked in nearby Turners Falls on January 29, 1909 and sent to a...

The Cremorne McAuley Mission, at 104 West 32nd Street near Sixth Avenue, New York. The engraving, which probably dates from around 1883-84, ...

(In the 1850s, fired by missionary zeal, the ladies of the Five Points Mission in Manhattan bravely battled poverty, squalor, intemperance, ...

This will be a bit of an extended gloss on my previous post , which I devoted to an excerpt from Samuel H. Hadley's Down in Hadley Stree...

Call me a cynic if you like, but I can't help wondering whether there wasn't more to the following story, which can be found in Samu...

I don't do it that much anymore, but for many years I made a point of going to as many used book sales as I could get to, and over time ...