"Songs and Sounds of the Anti-Rent Movement can be appreciated at multiple levels. Musicologists and folklorists will enjoy its astute analyses and find its approach to contrafacta worthwhile for adoption in other studies. Non-musicians will find their understanding of an important period of history enlivened by an appreciation of the emotional, intellectual, and historical dimensions of the cultural artifacts it produced … Newman has given us a focused and clearly-written account of an underexamined but important body of expressive culture." — The Hudson River Valley Review"This is a wonderful work. Newman has distilled from a big secondary literature a clear, accurate, and remarkably economical account of the Anti-Rent Movement in nineteenth-century New York.... Newman's work enables us to feel what the anti-rent faithful felt during the long struggle with their manor lords. There is nothing like Songs and Sounds in the literature. It's the best short history of the Anti-Rent Movement. It's the best analysis of popular culture in the Anti-Rent era." — Charles W. McCurdy, Professor of History and Law, Emeritus, University of Virginia"A model for others to emulate." — Richard Hamm, author of Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880–1920.
