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The built forms of New York City and Boston differed dramatically in the second half of the nineteenth century. This paper focuses on the changing forms of their retail districts and evaluates the divergence in those patterns in relation to their socioeconomic context. Historical atlases and city directories identified the locations of department stores, which were used as indicators of the retail districts while primary and secondary historical sources related locational decisions to their economic position and the structure of their elite classes. New York's unstable elite classes continued to move their residences north on Manhattan Island throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century and were unable and unwilling to stop the northward expansion of the retail district. Boston's stable ruling class was able to control retail expansion through various political acts limiting development and through social barriers that limited displays of conspicuous consumption. The importance of the structure of elite classes in mediating the processes of land allocation suggests that findings of New York, as a city of competitive capitalism with a splintered elite, and Boston, as a city of controlled capitalism with a ruling elite, might provide a useful framework for understanding the specific contexts within other urban built forms.

The article discusses manuscript sources in American radicalism. Scholars interested in American radicalism must be prepared to travel widely if they expect to inspect manuscript sources. Virtually every state, almost every university library of any stature, has some such holdings. Socialists, and other radicals, were prolific writers of letters, memoranda, speeches and pamphlets. They also tended to keep extensive minutes of meetings of branches, committees, national boards, and even of factions. Moreover, most Socialists had a sense of history and preserved their records. Unfortunately, there is no single repository for this Socialist material. At one time it was expected that the Tamiment Institute-then called the Rand School-Library in New York would house the material. But Socialists, in the course of human events, split into innumerable factions, and the leaders of different factions gave their papers to various libraries some of them thousands of miles apart. There were also geographic reasons for the dispersion: the early Socialists of the Nineteenth century lived in Indiana, New York, Massachusetts, and (after 1880) California.