Untimely Ruins
An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819-1919
Publication supported by the Neil Harris Endowment Fund
- Contents
- Review Quotes

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Of Light Bulbs and Bathtubs: Excavating the Modern City
1 Crumbling Columns and Day-Old Ruins:
Specters of Antiquity on the American Grand Tour, 1819–1837
2 "Even Eden, you know, ain’t all built":
Paper Cities, British Investors, and the Ruins of Cairo, Illinois, 1837–1844
3 The Petrified City:
Antiquity and Modernity in Melville’s New York, 1835–1865
4 Relapsing into Barbarism:
Labor, Ethnicity, and Ruin in Prospective Histories of Urban America, 1865–1906
5 "Plagued By Their Own Inventions":
Reframing the Technological Ruins of San Francisco, 1906–1909
6 The Metropolitan Life in Ruins:
Architectural and Fictional Speculations in New York, 1893–1919
Epilogue
Toward the Posthuman Ruin
Notes
Index
"Untimely Ruins is a magisterial work of scholarship, brimming with intelligence, insight, and interest on every page. Nick Yablon’s scholarship is prodigious. His extended meditation on the meanings of American ruins explains why they are distinctive, what they reveal, and how they matter. This is a book of exceptional historical expanse and interpretive ambition that is at the same time remarkably lucid from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, and page to page."—Carl Smith, author of The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City
“Nick Yablon ranges widely, from log cabins to skyscrapers and from Tocqueville to pulp fiction. He combines imaginative research with probing interpretation. Untimely Ruins offers fresh and challenging insights about the American built environment on nearly every page.”—T. J. Jackson Lears, Rutgers University
Architecture: American Architecture
Art: American Art
History: American History
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature
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