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Pickpocket's Tale The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York

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ISBN-10: 0393329895

ISBN-13: 9780393329896

Edition: 2007

Authors: Timothy J. Gilfoyle

List price: $30.00
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Description:

"A remarkable tale."Chicago Tribune In George Appo's world, child pickpockets swarmed the crowded streets, addicts drifted in furtive opium dens, and expert swindlers worked the lucrative green-goods game. On a good night Appo made as much as a skilled laborer made in a year. Bad nights left him with more than a dozen scars and over a decade in prisons from the Tombs and Sing Sing to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he reunited with another inmate, his father. The child of Irish and Chinese immigrants, Appo grew up in the notorious Five Points and Chinatown neighborhoods. He rose as an exemplar of the "good fellow," a criminal who relied on wile, who followed a…    
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Book details

List price: $30.00
Copyright year: 2007
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated
Publication date: 8/17/2007
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 480
Size: 0.55" wide x 0.82" long x 0.12" tall
Weight: 0.924
Language: English

Timothy J. Gilfoyle is professor of history at Loyola University Chicago where he teaches American urban and social history.  His research has focused on the development and evolution of 19th-century urban underworld subcultures and informal economies.  He is the author of A Pickpocket's Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York; City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920; The Urban Underworld in Late Nineteenth-Century New York: The Autobiography of George Appo; and co-author of The Flash Press: Sporting Men's Weeklies in the 1840s.  Gilfoyle’s interest in urban planning and public space is reflected…    

List of Illustrations
Preface
The Trials of Quimbo Appo
Urchins, Arabs, and Gutter-Snipes
A House of Refuge at Sea
Appo on: Violence
Factories for Turning Out Criminals
The "Guns" of Gotham
Drafted
Opium Dens and Bohemia
The Old Homestead
The Dives
Appo on: Jack Collins
Tombs Justice
Appo on: Good Fellows
Fences
"That Galling Yoke of Servitude"
Danny Driscoll and the Whyos
Eastern State Penitentiary
Green Goods
Appo on: Jersey City
Poughkeepsie
Appo on: Stealing Guys
The Lexow Committee
In the Tenderloin
A Marked Man
Buried Alive
A Genuine Reformation
Epilogue: The Finest Crook
Acknowledgments
Appendixes
New York State Male Prison Populations, 1870-1900
New York State Prison Expenditures, 1866-1900
Sing Sing Death and Insanity Rates, 1870-1900
Auburn Death and Insanity Rates, 1870-1900
Clinton Death and Insanity Rates, 1870-1900
Notes
Illustration Credits
Index