front cover of Chicago by Day and Night
Chicago by Day and Night
The Pleasure Seeker's Guide to the Paris of America
Paul Durica and Bill Savage
Northwestern University Press, 2013
Chicago by Day and Night: The Pleasure Seeker’s Guide to the Paris of America is an actual guidebook to Chicago for visitors to the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. This unauthorized handbook to the rowdy city outside the elegant fairgrounds explores pleasures high and low. The theaters and music, architectural glories, parks and boulevards, churches and synagogues, and other elevated pursuits the authors included in 1893 gave the book a veneer of high culture. But the book owed its popularity to its insider tips about Chicago's lurid and louche entertainments—drink, gambling, and sex. With a wink and tongue firmly in cheek, the original authors condemned Gilded Age vice while offering curious travelers precise directions to the dubious, decadent, and debauched quarters of the Windy City. 

To introduce this compulsively readable, gift-quality journey through the Chicago of 1893, Chicago writers and humorists Paul Durica and Bill Savage have added an expert introduction to Gilded Age Chicago and the World's Columbian Exposition. Showcasing the first Ferris wheel, dazzling new electrification technologies, and exhibits from around the world, the Exposition was Chicago’s chance to prove it had risen from the ashes of the Great Fire and would claim a place among the world’s great cities.

Both a perfect keepsake or gift for Chicago travelers as well as an invaluable text for readers interested in the history of Chicago, the Midwest, or Gilded Age urban life, Chicago by Day and Night is a beloved classic of Chicago writing. 
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front cover of City of Darkness, City of Light
City of Darkness, City of Light
Emigre Filmmakers in Paris, 1929-1939
Alastair Phillips
Amsterdam University Press, 2004
The volume is the first-ever book-length study of the cinematic representation of Paris in the films of German èmigrè filmmakers, many of whom fled there as a refuge from Hitler. In coming to Paris—a privileged site in terms of production, exhibition, and film culture—these experienced professionals also encountered resistance: hostility toward Germans, anti-Semitism, and boycotts from a French industry afraid of losing jobs to foreigners. Phillips juxtaposes the cinematic portrayal of Paris in the films of Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Max Ophüls, Anatol Litvak, and others with the wider social and cultural debates about the city in cinema.
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City of Noise
Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris
Aimee Boutin
University of Illinois Press, 2015
Beloved as the city of light, Paris in the nineteenth century sparked the acclaim of poets and the odium of the bourgeois with its distinctive sounds. Street vendors bellowed songs known as the Cris de Paris that had been associated with their trades since the Middle Ages; musicians itinerant and otherwise played for change; and flâneurs-writers, fascinated with the city's underside, listened and recorded much about what they heard.
 
Aimée Boutin tours the sonic space that orchestrated the different, often conflicting sound cultures that defined the street ambience of Paris. Mining accounts that range from guidebooks to verse, Boutin braids literary, cultural, and social history to reconstruct a lost auditory environment. Throughout, impressions of street noise shape writers' sense of place and perception of modern social relations. As Boutin shows, the din of the Cris contrasted economic abundance with the disparities of the capital, old and new traditions, and the vibrancy of street commerce with an increasing bourgeois demand for quiet. In time, peddlers who provided the soundtrack for Paris's narrow streets yielded to modernity, with its taciturn shopkeepers and wide-open boulevards, and the fading songs of the Cris became a dirge for the passing of old ways.
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The Courtiers' Anatomists
Animals and Humans in Louis XIV's Paris
Anita Guerrini
University of Chicago Press, 2015
The Courtiers' Anatomists is about dead bodies and live animals in Louis XIV's Paris--and the surprising links between them. Examining the practice of seventeenth-century anatomy, Anita Guerrini reveals how anatomy and natural history were connected through animal dissection and vivisection. Driven by an insatiable curiosity, Parisian scientists, with the support of the king, dissected hundreds of animals from the royal menageries and the streets of Paris. Guerrini is the first to tell the story of Joseph-Guichard Duverney, who performed violent, riot-inducing dissections of both animal and human bodies before the king at Versailles and in front of hundreds of spectators at the King's Garden in Paris. At the Paris Academy of Sciences, meanwhile, Claude Perrault, with the help of Duverney’s dissections, edited two folios in the 1670s filled with lavish illustrations by court artists of exotic royal animals.

Through the stories of Duverney and Perrault, as well as those of Marin Cureau de la Chambre, Jean Pecquet, and Louis Gayant, The Courtiers' Anatomists explores the relationships between empiricism and theory, human and animal, as well as the origins of the natural history museum and the relationship between science and other cultural activities, including art, music, and literature.
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