Posted by request.

--Moderator, NYHIST-L

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Award winning social historian Timothy Gilfoyle will discuss his book A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York on Monday, October 23rd at 7 p.m. at the University at Albany Performing Arts Center, 2nd floor, 1400 Washington Avenue in Albany. The event, sponsored by Archives Partnership Trust and the University at Albany, is free and open to the public. For more information, contact (518) 473-7105.

Set in Gilded Age New York, Professor Gilfoyle’s work features one of that period’s most colorful characters, George Appo, a pickpocket and con man who gained prominence after testifying in 1894 about police corruption and, upon achievement of great notoriety, even played himself on Broadway.

According to Publishers Weekly, “Gilfoyle paints a Hogarthian cityscape peopled with gang ruffians, gentlemen swindlers, dirty politicians, cunning shysters, and evangelical reformers, all depicted with a sympathetic understanding of the rigors of life on the margins.  The result is a colorful, evocative social history.”

A professor of history at Loyola University in Chicago, Timothy Gilfoyle has been honored with the prestigious Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians for his book City of Eros and has been selected as the New York State Archives Researcher of the Year for 2006.