Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York Audiobook (Free)

Today it is referred to as Roosevelt Isle. In 1828, when New York City purchased this slim, two-mile-long isle in the East River, it had been called Blackwell’s Island. There, over another 100 years, the city would create a lunatic asylum, prison, hospital, workhouse, and almshouse. Stacy Horn provides crafted a compelling and chilling narrative informed through the tales of the poor souls delivered to Blackwell’s, as well as the period’s town officials, reformers, and journalists (including the popular about Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century NY Nellie Bly).

Damnation Island re-creates what daily life was like on the island, what politics shaped it, and what constituted charity and therapy in the nineteenth century. Throughout the book, we return to the remarkable Blackwell’s missionary Reverend French, champ of the ignored, as he ministers to these inmates, battles the bureaucratic mazes of the Corrections Department and a corrupt Town Hall, testifies at salacious studies, and in his journal wonders about man’s inhumanity to guy.

For background fans, and for anyone thinking about the ways we look after the least fortunate in our midst, Damnation Island can be an eye-opening take a look at a closed and secretive world. In an account that is exceedingly relevant today, Horn shows us how far we’ve come-and how much work still continues to be.