ABSTRACT
In the summer of 1814, facing a threatened British invasion, New York City boiled with activity. Brigades of citizen volunteers—arrayed, as was the custom, by trade, profession, race, and gender—marched off to fashion forts, breastworks, and blockhouses. Artisans and patriotic ladies, lawyers and cartmen, merchants, shopkeepers, and “free people of color” felled trees, dug trenches, and hauled artillery about Brooklyn Heights and Upper Manhattan, while some 23,000 volunteer militiamen, flocking in from the surrounding countryside, drilled and paraded. The crisis passed; that attack never came. But now another one has, of quite a different sort, and contemporary brigades are rallying to the defense and repair of their city. Within weeks of the devastation, the town was abuzz with meetings and conferences. Panels of experts, with large crowds in attendance, joined in passionate discussions about where to go from here. Soon the Internet’s virtual agora was festooned with plans for rebuilding the municipality, posted by business groups and unions, architects and planners, churches, communities, and social welfare organizations: citizens wielding word processors rather than muskets.
