The New England Watch and Ward Society provides a new window into the history of American Protestantism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By suppressing obscene literature, gambling, and prostitution, the moral reform organization embodied Protestant efforts to shape public morality in an increasing intellectually and culturally diverse society.

Kane explores the role of religious identity in Boston in the years 1900-1920, arguing that Catholicism was a central integrating force among different class and ethnic groups. She traces the effect of changing class status on religious identity and solidarity, and she delineates the social and cultural meaning of Catholicism in a city where Yankee Protestant nativism persisted even as its hegemony was in decline.

This colorful and perceptive study presents persuasive evidence that the saloon, far from being a magnet for vice and crime, played an important role in working-class community life. Focusing on public drinking in "wide open" Chicago and tightly controlled Boston, Duis offers a provocative discussion of the saloon as a social institution and a locus of the struggle between middle-class notions of privacy and working-class uses of public space.

Greasepaint Puritan details the life and work of Bradford Ropes, author of the bawdy 1932 novel 42nd Street, on which the classic film and its stage adaptation are based. Inspired by Ropes’s own experiences as a performer, 42nd Street “reads less like a novel than like a documentary about the lives of New York’s theatre people and, above all, about the practicalities, the personalities, and the sexual politics that go into the making of a show,” according to Richard Brody in The New Yorker. Why did Ropes’s body of work--which included a trilogy of backstage novels--and consequently his biographical footsteps, disappear into obscurity? Descended from Mayflower Pilgrims, Ropes rebelled against the “Proper Bostonian” life, in a career that touched upon the Jazz Age, American vaudeville, and theater censorship. Greasepaint Puritan follows Ropes’s successful career as both a performer and the author of the backstage novels 42nd Street, Stage Mother, and Go Into Your Dance. Populated by scheming stage mothers, precocious stage children, grandiose bit players, and tart-tongued chorines, these novels centered on the lives and relationships of gay men on Broadway during the Jazz Age and Prohibition era. Rigorously researched, Greasepaint Puritan chronicles Ropes’s career as a successful screenwriter in 1930s and ’40s Hollywood, where he continued to be a part of a dynamic gay subculture within the movie industry before returning to obscurity in the 1950s. His legacy lives on in the Hollywood and Broadway incarnations of 42nd Street—but Greasepaint Puritan restores the “forgotten melody” of the man who first envisioned its colorful characters.

This collection presents a radical rethinking of the secularization of American public life.

This first examination of the trade in erotica during the 1920s and '30s provides an understanding of the evolution of both obscenity law and sexual explicitness in literature, and raises fascinating questions about moral control, idealism, and the marketplace in ways that continue to resonate today.