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Cause for Alarm : The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City by Amy S. Greenberg is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Cause for Alarm : The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City about?

Though central to the social, political, and cultural life of the nineteenth-century city, the urban volunteer fire department has nevertheless been largely ignored by historians. Redressing this neglect, Amy Greenberg reveals the meaning of this central institution by comparing the fire departments of Baltimore, St. Louis, and San Francisco from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Volunteer fire companies protected highly flammable cities from fire and provided many men with friendship, brotherhood, and a way to prove their civic virtue. While other scholars have claimed that fire companies were primarily working class, Greenberg shows that they were actually mixed social groups: merchants and working men, immigrants and native-born--all found a common identity as firemen. Cause for Alarm presents a new vision of urban culture, one defined not by class but by gender. Volunteer firefighting united men in a shared masculine celebration of strength and bravery, skill and appearance. In an otherwise alienating environment, fire companies provided men from all walks of life with status, community, and an outlet for competition, which sometimes even led to elaborate brawl

Who reads Cause for Alarm : The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City?

Author

Amy S. Greenberg

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published

2014

Language

EN

ISBN

9780691603438

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

History, Social Science, Technology

Rating

3.88 / 5 (7 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14