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Brooklyn's Renaissance: Commerce, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World by Melissa Meriam Bullard

2019; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jer.2019.0075

1553-0620

Alexander Manevitz,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Reviewed by: Brooklyn's Renaissance: Commerce, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World by Melissa Meriam Bullard Alexander Manevitz (bio) Brooklyn's Renaissance: Commerce, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. By Melissa Meriam Bullard. (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. 458. Cloth, $109.99.) Amid rapid development and gentrification in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, Brooklyn has been rebranded as the cultural capital of all things trendy. In Brooklyn's Renaissance: Commerce, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World, Melissa Meriam Bullard reminds us that, for some Brooklynites, that cultural tradition dates back almost two centuries to a time before the then-independent city was consolidated into New York City. This substantial new book focuses on the "mid-nineteenth century when a core of wealthy commercial men and their families … created a cultural renaissance in their adopted city. Working together they laid the groundwork for Brooklyn's modern cultural scene by building the societies and institutions that encouraged the arts" (2). Bullard highlights many members of Brooklyn's burgeoning white commercial elite, but Luther Wyman—a transatlantic shipper and merchant—serves as "our exemplar" throughout the rise, peak, turmoil, and decline of Brooklyn's renaissance (13, 377). [End Page 588] Tracing the creation and operation of many social and cultural organizations like the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Bullard argues that "Brooklyn's relatively late but accelerated quest for a distinct urban identity compelled her leading citizens to smooth over political and confessional differences" (42). This shared urban identity, which she often calls "civic pride," forms the core of her analysis (101). Dense with information and detailed stories about the inner workings of Brooklyn's most famous cultural organizations, Bullard's research is a valuable resource for anyone interested in social and cultural worlds of the city's wealthy white elite in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood before, during, and after the American Civil War. With her focus on the nineteenth-century United States, it may appear that Bullard is moving away from the fifteenth-century Florence of her previous work, but she is able to meld both fields into an unexpected and interesting contribution to the social and cultural history of New York City and Brooklyn. Bullard puts antebellum Brooklyn in conversation with Renaissance Italy because the merchant elite of both eras became patrons of local arts, and some Brooklynites explicitly placed themselves in that Italianate tradition. She deploys a "bifocal concept of renaissance" that grapples with the history and legacies of the Italian Renaissance as well as a general concept of "cultural flowering" (46). These connections were informative, emphasizing the personal and commercial transatlantic networks that undergirded Brooklyn's wealth in the nineteenth century. Sometimes, however, the parallels rely too heavily on vague similarities. For instance, her invocation of campanilismo, the Italian Renaissance idea of "loyalty to one's bell tower," suggests Medici Florence and antebellum Brooklyn shared intensely local social and political machinations. That may be true generally, but without specific context in either place as to the competing power structures, inter-class dynamics, or battles over geographic control it is unclear what is unique about the Italian Renaissance patrons that also is not true about any urban commercial elite trying to establish authority and legitimacy (189). Despite these reservations, her integration of the Italian Renaissance into the history of Brooklyn's renaissance offers a timely historiographical contribution. Bullard joins Susannah Shaw Romney and others in an important and growing subfield that examines New York City in an Atlantic context. New York has been an internationally connected city since its founding, and many excellent scholars have studied how the [End Page 589] world came to the city, but Bullard places Brooklyn in an Atlantic context, demonstrating the greater depth of understanding that we can bring to local social interactions through an Atlantic lens. While situating Brooklyn in the broader Atlantic world, Bullard still manages to give the mid-nineteenth-century city the focused attention it deserves without letting it get lost in the transoceanic connections or subsumed by Manhattan's story. Brooklyn has its own rich history before the consolidation of New York City's five boroughs, and Bullard...