Smugglers Bootleggers And Scofflaws

Uses previously unstudied Coast Guard records for New York City and environs to examine the development of Rum Row and smuggling in New York City during Prohibition. With the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, “drying up” New York City promised to be the greatest triumph of the proponents of Prohibition. Instead, the city remained the nation’s greatest liquor market. Smugglers, Bootleggers, and Scofflaws focuses on liquor smuggling to tell the story of Prohibition in New York City. Using previously unstudied Coast Guard records from 1920 to 1933 for New York City and environs, Ellen NicKenzie Lawson examines the development of Rum Row and smuggling via the coasts of Long Island, the Long Island Sound, the Jersey shore, and along the Hudson and East Rivers. Lawson demonstrates how smuggling syndicates on the Lower East Side, the West Side, and Little Italy contributed to the emergence of the Broadway Mob. She also explores New York City’s scofflaw population—patrons of thirty thousand speakeasies and five hundred nightclubs—as well as how politicians Fiorello La Guardia, James “Jimmy” Walker, Nicholas Murray Butler, Pauline Morton Sabin, and Al Smith articulated their views on Prohibition to the nation. Lawson argues that in their assertion of the freedom to drink alcohol for enjoyment, New York’s smugglers, bootleggers, and scofflaws belong in the American tradition of defending liberty. The result was the historically unprecedented step of repeal of a constitutional amendment with passage of the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933.

"Since early colonial times, the Great Lakes, the Upper St. Lawrence and Lake Champlain have been smugglers' highways. Smugglers kept commerce alive in Canada in the early nineteenth century, contributed to the British-Canadian victory in the War of 1812, and carried escaped slaves to freedom in Canada in the decades before the American Civil War. They also corrupted government officials, terrorized honest citizens and committed acts of ruthless violence. Some became rich; others died with their boots on. Some were cut down by Coast Guard bullets; more were gunned down by rival bootleggers. All of them were brazen and ingenious and they stopped at nothing. Whether they operated in defiance of unjust laws or out of pure greed, the smugglers and bootleggers carved a legacy of violence and adventure, one that has had a profound impact upon the histories of Canada and the United States."--Back cover.

Here for the first time is a complete look at Prohibition in northern New York: the shootings, killings, wild pursuits, gunplay at levels never seen before or since, corrupt lawmen, scofflaws, stills, Bootleg Kings, border runners, humorous incidents, ingenious smuggling techniques, hundreds of speakeasies, thousands of arrest stories, and more. Volume 1 covers the first half of Prohibition.Also revealed is northern New York's critical role in the repeal of Prohibition nationally. Two main sources that neither state nor federal enforcement organizations could plug were the offshore ships known as Rum Row (near New York City), and bootleggers crossing the state's border with Canada, especially the 63-mile land border with Quebec. Together they slaked the thirst of millions of New Yorkers, including those in the Big Apple.As the most populous and liberal state, New York led the resistance to Prohibition. It was often said that, "As New York goes, so goes the nation." And so it was. New York went against Prohibition, and after 14 tumultuous, violent, incredible years, the nation repealed a constitutional amendment-the only time that has ever happened in US history.

Nicknamed "Liquor Island," Long Island was rumrunner's paradise during Prohibition. With its proximity to major markets and coastal communities for easy transit, Suffolk County was awash in illegal hooch. Smugglers bringing cases of booze from offshore often secretly hid product temporarily in local garages and sheds, leaving a bottle as a thank-you. Coded communication crisscrossed the county on shortwave radios arranging sales and logistics. Violence from criminal outfits disrupted previously quiet towns, as locals too often were swept up in dangerous unintentional engagements with bootleggers. Pour one out and join author Amy Kasuga Folk as she recounts stories from Suffolk County's Prohibition era

This book examines how, beginning in the 1960s up to the present, a new type of fiction was created in America, but also in Europe and Latin America, in response to the cultural, social, and political turmoil of the time. The author has coined the term “Surfiction” for this New Fiction. Written in an informal, provocative style, by an internationally known practitioner, these essays examine the cultural, social, and political conditions that forced serious writers to reflect (often within the work itself) on the act of writing fiction in the modern world. The entire book can be read as a manifesto for the present and future of the new fiction. This book is the first in the SUNY series in Postmodern Culture, edited by Joseph Natoli.

Winner of the 2020 Canadian Jewish Literary Award in the category of Jewish Thought and Culture Bal tashḥit, the Jewish prohibition against wastefulness and destruction, is considered to be an ecological ethical principle by contemporary Jewish environmentalists. Waste Not provides a comprehensive intellectual history of this concept, charting its evolution from the Bible through classical rabbinic literature, commentaries, codes of law, responsa, and the works of modern environmentalists. Tanhum S. Yoreh uses the methodology of tradition histories to identify pivotal moments in the development of the prohibition—in particular, its transition into an economic framework. He finds that bal tashḥit's earliest stages of conceptualization connect the prohibition against wastefulness with avoidance of self-harm. This connection is commonplace within contemporary environmental thought and a universalizing Jewish principle with important contributions to be made to Jewish and general societal ecological discourse. This narrative provides a foundation for understanding bal tashḥit as an environmental ethic for today and tomorrow.

Encompasses key years and important events in Theodore Roosevelt’s early life and career. A Most Glorious Ride presents the complete diaries of Theodore Roosevelt from 1877 to 1886. Covering the formative years of his life, Roosevelt’s entries show the transformation of a sickly and solitary Harvard freshman into a confident and increasingly robust young adult. He writes about his grief over the premature death of his father, his courtship and marriage to his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee, and later the death of Alice and his mother on the same day. The diaries chronicle his burgeoning political career in New York City and his election to the New York State Assembly. With his descriptions of balls, dinner parties, and nights at the opera, they offer a glimpse into life among the Gilded Age elite in Boston and New York. They also recount Roosevelt’s first birding and hunting trips to the Adirondacks, the Maine woods, and the American West. Ending with Roosevelt’s secret engagement to his second wife, Edith Kermit Carow, A Most Glorious Ride provides an intimate look into the life of the man who would become America’s twenty-sixth president. Brought together for the first time in a single volume, the diaries have been meticulously transcribed, annotated, and introduced by Edward P. Kohn. Twenty-four black-and-white photographs are also included. “Edward P. Kohn has done scholars a great public service by editing the diaries of Theodore Roosevelt, 1877–1886. This volume is essential reading for anybody interested in the rise of the great Rough Rider. Highly recommended.” — Douglas Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America “I thought there was nothing new under the sun to be done on Theodore Roosevelt, given the thousands of books already published, but Edward P. Kohn has discovered, and admirably filled, a major gap in books on the life and times of TR. By bringing these diaries together in one place for the first time and providing expert annotation and footnotes, Kohn makes an extremely valuable contribution to understanding Roosevelt.” — Paul Grondahl, author of I Rose Like a Rocket: The Political Education of Theodore Roosevelt “A Most Glorious Ride is an outstanding addition not only to the scholarship on Roosevelt but also to the study of the Gilded Age, capturing the social norms of the times and offering insights into a long-gone era of family life.” — Michael Patrick Cullinane, author of Liberty and American Anti-Imperialism: 1898–1909

The first detailed examination of African Americans and First Amendment rights, from the colonial era to the present. African Americans and the First Amendment is the first book to explore in detail the relationship between African Americans and our “first freedoms,” especially freedom of speech. Timothy C. Shiell utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to demonstrate that a strong commitment to civil liberty and to racial equality are mutually supportive, as they share an opposition to orthodoxy and a commitment to greater inclusion and participation. This crucial connection is evidenced throughout US history, from the days of colonial and antebellum slavery to Jim Crow: in the landmark US Supreme Court decision in 1937 freeing the black communist Angelo Herndon; in the struggles and victories of the civil rights movement, from the late 1930s to the late ’60s; and in the historical and modern debates over hate speech restrictions. Liberty and equality can conflict in individual cases, Shiell argues, but there is no fundamental conflict between them. Robust First Amendment values protect and encourage demands for racial equality while weak First Amendment values, in contrast, lead to censorship and a chilling of demands for racial equality. Timothy C. Shiell is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Stout. His books include Campus Hate Speech on Trial: Second Edition, Revised and Legal Philosophy: Selected Readings.