Introduction

Abstract

Brooklyn became a vibrant center for the arts in the mid-nineteenth century thanks to merchant patrons who shared a haut bourgeois civilizing ethos, among them the exemplar Luther Boynton Wyman of the Black Ball Line of Liverpool packets. Atlantic commercial networks, collaborative patronage, and civic pride conjoined to create Brooklyn’s arts-centered civic identity separate from New York City. Renaissance as cultural flowering found parallel precedent in the historical Italian Renaissance and in the Atlantic World of maritime commerce linking New York Port and Liverpool. This new cultural history of Brooklyn set in its Atlantic World context also explores the fading of its renaissance in the Gilded Age after the Civil War, a fading marked by the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and then consolidation as a borough of the City of Greater New York in 1898 at which time Brooklyn relinquished its civic independence.