The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power

by Deirdre Mask

Founded in 1874, the Universal Postal Union, based in Bern, Switzerland, is the world’s second-oldest international organization.

The first and oldest international organization—being established employing a treaty, and creating a permanent secretariat, with a global membership—was the International Telecommunication Union (founded in 1865). (Wikipedia)

“The poor were dying in disproportionate numbers not because they suffered from moral failings,” Johnson writes. “They were dying because they were being poisoned.”

“We may grimace when we hear people talk of ‘finding themselves,’” Nicholas Carr has explained in his book The Glass Cage. “But the figure of speech, however vain and shopworn, acknowledges our deeply held sense that who we are is tangled up in where we are.”

in 1845, Jews were legally confined to a closed list of surnames, names they could not change, setting them up for effortless identification later by the Nazis.

Once Manhattan was Mannahatta, a sylvan island where black bears, timber rattlesnakes, mountain lions and white-tailed deer roamed. So many tree frogs croaked that, as one naturalist wrote in 1748, it was “difficult for a man to make himself heard.” Streams teemed with eels, porpoises danced in the sea, and migratory birds chattered in chestnut and tulip tree forests. A red maple swamp full of beavers sat in the middle of what is now Times Square. Manhattan once boasted more plant species than Yosemite, more birds than the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and more ecological communities than Yellowstone, ecologist Eric Sanderson has explained.

Like so many visionaries, Penn died penniless, infirm, and justifiably grumpy, having tried unsuccessfully to sell Pennsylvania to recoup his debts.

Barthes was electrified by Tokyo’s sheer differentness from Paris. “To live in a country where one doesn’t know the language, and to live audaciously, outside tourist tracks, is the most dangerous of adventures,” he wrote. If “I had to imagine a new Robinson Crusoe, I would not place him on a desert island, but in a city of twelve million people where he could decipher neither speech nor

Floridians lynched at least 161 blacks between 1890 and 1920—a rate three times higher than Alabama, and twice as high as Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana. Florida’s state constitution disenfranchised black people and forbade white teachers from teaching them.

“Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men’s blood,” Burnham is famous for having (probably) said.