Today it is referred to as Roosevelt Isle. In 1828, when NEW YORK purchased this thin, two-mile-long isle in the East River, it was called Blackwell’s Isle. There, over the next 100 years, the town would create a lunatic asylum, jail, hospital, workhouse, and almshouse. Stacy Horn offers crafted a convincing and chilling narrative told through the tales of the poor souls delivered to Blackwell’s, aswell as the period’s city officials, reformers, and journalists (including the popular about Damnation Island: Poor, Ill, Mad, and Lawbreaker in 19th-Century New York Nellie Bly).

Damnation Island re-creates what daily life was like in the isle, what politics shaped it, and what constituted charity and therapy in the nineteenth hundred years. Throughout the reserve, we return to the remarkable Blackwell’s missionary Reverend French, champion of the forgotten, as he ministers to these inmates, battles the bureaucratic mazes from the Corrections Section and a corrupt City Hall, testifies at salacious studies, and in his diary miracles about man’s inhumanity to guy.

For history fans, and for anyone interested in the methods we look after minimal fortunate in our midst, Damnation Island can be an eye-opening look at a closed and secretive world. In an account that is exceedingly relevant today, Horn displays us how far we’ve come-and just how much work still continues to be.