This electronic edition of New York, the Nation's Metropolis was created between February and June of 2000 as an MA Thesis for the Program in American Studies at the University of Virginia. It consists of both a central text - encompassing my editorial introductions and the html reproduction of the original book - and a miscellany of supplementary materials which I will explain below. While in the central text I have worked to preserve the linearity of the original print edition of the book, in the supplementary materials I have dispensed with strict sequential order. Rather, as the reader moves from chapter one through chapter twenty-five, links to the various kinds of additional materials appear at the bottom of each page.
By far the bulk of my writing in this site appears in the individual chapter annotations. These notes serve the dual purposes of providing historical and factual context for each chapter's most prominent structure or structures, and directing readerly attention towards what, in my understanding, are the most rhetorically crucial features of each chapter. In most cases the former purpose takes place as a factual historical narrative while the latter takes place as some thing more like a close reading - one through which I have, whenever possible, attempted to articulate the ways in which the object of my local reading participates in the text's more global concerns. The reading in the chapter annotations are emphatically local; I have resisted as much as possible the temptation to include in them interpretations which organize them into a hierarchy of rhetorical significance. In order to compensate for the limitations of the annotations' specificity, I have included a more selective and more coarsely rendered reading in my Critical Introduction. While the Introduction cannot account for every one of the book's twenty-five chapters, it proposes the contour of a global narrative by drawing on chapters one, two, four, nine, twelve, seventeen, and twenty-five.
I have also included in each chapter a map of Manhattan which indicates the location of the drawings point of view with a red dot, and a facsimile image of the chapter as it appears in the original print version.
I have in this site abandoned most codes of citation and attribution to which most scholarly endeavors adhere. I came to the conclusion early in the project that - given the mass or tangential opportunities the structure of the site already presented - footnotes and other references would do more to hinder than to help readers in their journey through the page. Readers who would like to know more about my research materials should read my concluding piece - the Bibliographical Essay - which contains a complete reference for each of my sources. Any further questions regarding my research can be addressed to me personally via email: sat4n@virginia.edu
I have called each of the book's twenty-five sections "chapters" and have referred to them throughout my writing as chapter one, chapter two, etc. "Chapter" does not appear in Marcus' writing, and he does not write out the section numbers; the sections are designated solely by roman numerals. In order to emphasize the provisional nature of my use of the word chapter, and of the numbers which follow it, I have capitalized neither in my writing.
Samuel A. Turner
June, 2000