A splendid study of the changing law of municipal corporations.(Journal of American History) Public Property and Private Power, which tells the story of the conversion of the propertied, chartered city of New York into a model municipality of nineteenth-century America, is a work which allows us to examine the aesthetics of the historian's craft Like all really good researchers Hartog discovered something very different from what he started out to find. It takes bright ideas to light up archival material initially and then it takes good sense to switch them off and let the records glow on their own. Hartog did this.... [He] has succeeded in... letting the complexity, contradictoriness, [and] intractable, as well as yielding, aspects of his material complement the coherence he has created in this admirable study.(Reviews in American History)
