New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Police Scandal that Launched the Progressive Era

New York Exposed offers a narrative history of the first major crusade to clean up Gotham. Daniel Czitrom does full justice to this spellbinding story by telling it within the larger contexts of national politics, poverty, patronage, vote fraud and vote suppression, and police violence. The effort to root out corrupt cops and crooked politicians morphed into something much more profound: a public reckoning over what New York–and the American city–had become since the Civil War.

Animated by as vivid a cast as New York has ever produced, the book's key characters include Police Superintendent Thomas Byrnes and Inspector Alexander "Clubber" Williams, the nation's most famous cops, as well as anarchist revolutionary Emma Goldman, the zealous prosecutor John W. Goff, and an array of politicos, immigrant leaders, labor bosses, prostitutes, show-business entrepreneurs, counterfeiters, and reformers and muckrakers determined to change business as usual. New York Exposed offers an unforgettable portrait of a city in a truly transformative moment.