Peter C. Baldwin provides us with a richly detailed history of the night in the cities of the industrial core of the United States, moving from the “downright perilous” streets of colonial cities to the effects of the electrification of urban public and domestic lighting by 1920. The core of the book (chs. 2–10) focuses on the developments of the nineteenth century, from the shadows of the gas lamps to the glare of electric lighting. Baldwin skillfully balances a story of social upheaval and technological innovation with a clear sense of the continuities of the urban night, showing how its public spaces remained dominated by men.

Labor, leisure, and gender organize this study. Baldwin explains how when mid-nineteenth-century cotton mill girls and young male clerks ended their long workday sometime after 6 p.m., they entered the urban night far less supervised by family, church, or state than young people of previous generations. Tempted by Broadway, lured to gambling dens, or edified by choir practice, these young people walked a fine line between recreation and dissipation. Newspaper editorials and popular tracts describe the moral peril of these hours, but Baldwin draws on numerous diaries and letters to give a clearer sense of the actual experiences of the urban night. We see that the unequal progress of gas lighting and the limits of policing invited all classes to use the urban night as never before: Baldwin describes the sites of drinking, whoring, and gambling alongside shopping, dancing at charity balls, and serenading. It was the theater, Baldwin notes, which often bridged the more respectable early evening with the sharper edge of the late night. By the 1870s, performances started uniformly at 8 p.m. and ended sometime after 10 p.m.

For an important minority of the city's population, the night meant work. Baldwin examines a range of more or less counter-cyclical occupations: cleaning city streets and privies; producing and distributing several editions of each daily newspaper; provisioning, transport, and shipping; and manufacturing (including a fascinating discussion of attempts to limit women's factory work at night). Essential to all this nightlife and night work were the “owl cars” (all-night buses or trolleys) that Baldwin examines to show the opportunities and dangers of the urban night for women of all classes. In the new urban night we see women and men enacting the gender roles of an industrial, capitalist, and consumer age in spaces shared with women but dominated by men.

The vivid scenes that make up this study, unfolding in burgeoning cities from New York to Omaha, evoke a sense of the profound transformation of the urban night as colonial danger and desolation gave way to teeming streets in which waves of labor and leisure collided. Yet Baldwin shows how the night relentlessly underscored and sustained the divisions between rich and poor, polite and rude, old and young, and above all, between men and women. Urban historians and gender historians will find many points of comparison and inspiration here.