This lecture describes the development of the of the class structure that we still live under in the U.S. and the beginnings of what we now call Pop Culture, in the Lower East Side of more than a century ago.

In the early 19th Century the Five Points, a tiny area in the general vicinity of today's Chinatown, became America's first slum. There immigrants, craftsmen and former slaves—united at first only by their poverty and the disdain directed at them by "respectable" New Yorkers—developed their own identity, language and entertainment, rather than striving for respectability. Five Pointers and the elites learned to regard each other with a still-familiar mixture of fear and curiosity.  They set the pattern for class relations in America.

What’s more, the roots of American Pop Culture--from slang and comic books to Hollywood action blockbusters, from rap to rock 'n roll and tap dancing—can be traced to the pastimes and diversions of the Five Points.

Several decades later, Eastern European Jewish immigrants built on this heritage. They nationalized and mass-produced both the popular culture of the Lower East Side and its pro-labor, pro-tenant political activism. These Eastern European Jewish immigrants took the internal culture of the Lower East Side and turned it outward, completing the cultural revolution that began in the 1830s with the collision of craft workers, Irish immigrants and freed slaves.  And in the process, they helped make the Lower East Side—formerly known as the Five Points—the most culturally fertile land in the United States.