The club has long been a behemoth in South Brooklyn politics, with its ability to turn out the vote and connections to elected officials. Judging by the turnout, the club also seems to have recovered from the unwanted attention it received from the 2001 mayor's race.

Among the attendees were Democratic county leader Vito Lopez, Rep. Jerry Nadler, City Comptroller Bill Thompson, Assemblywoman Joan Millman, and two candidates for Yvette Clarke's City Council seat: Wellington Sharpe and Harry Schiffman.

And walking in just as the introductions were finished, but before the Electric Slide began, was State Senator Marty Golden, a Republican.

-- Azi Paybarah

At Bard, the summer’s principal curio has been Schumann’s only completed opera, Genoveva, a work that’s had an occasional European revival but no lasting success since its less than triumphant premiere in 1850. For reasons that would require years of psychoanalysis to unravel, Schumann’s mercurial music, by turns magisterial and intimate, stirs me more than perhaps that of any other composer. I was deeply moved by Genoveva, as performed at Bard’s space-age, Frank Gehry–designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, and I would jump at the chance to see it again.

Like Wagner, Schumann was a man with a mission, determined to put German Romantic opera on the noble footing occupied by the concert music of Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn. Unlike the more dramatically inclined Wagner, however, he viewed opera as a fusion of poetry and music. The plot of Genoveva details the horrific persecution of a stalwart wife wrongly accused of adultery with the conniving friend of her absent husband, who’s off fighting for the Christians in eighth-century Europe. But Schumann’s impassioned handling of it in compressed, swift-flowing scenes, set to tumultuous music that can turn on a dime from rhapsodic to eerie, elevates the piece way beyond pulp fiction.

John Daverio, in his definitive biography of the composer, Robert Schumann: Herald of “A New Poetic Age” (1997), calls Genoveva a “literary opera,” one that “begins as a Trauerspiel, a play of mourning, and ends as a hagiographic drama of redemption.” In this, the work calls to mind another composer’s singular operatic achievement—Debussy’s Pélleas et Mélisande, which is similarly gripping as a large-scale musical poem about cruelty redeemed.

Mr. Botstein led the American Symphony Orchestra with knowing efficiency. Kasper Bech Holten, the artistic director of the Royal Danish Opera, devised a visually stunning production that matched the score for opulent austerity. In the title role, the alluring Swedish soprano Yiva Kihlberg led a strong international cast that included the Danish baritone Johannes Mannov as Siegfried, and the American mezzo-soprano Michaela Martens as the sorceress Margaretha. The affectingly light-voiced French tenor Philippe Castagner was scarily sympathetic in the opera’s most complex role—that of Golo, the treacherous best friend. Theirs was a Genoveva that should not be allowed to disappear.

MOSTLY MOZART'S MAJOR DISCOVERY has been the rare staging of an untitled operatic fragment known by the name of its heroine, Zaide. In 1779, Mozart was just 23 when he began an opera that he hoped would win him employment in Vienna. The plot he chose, a fashionable story of Oriental captivity, introduced a theme—the abuse of power—that he would later address with such astonishing complexity in his mature masterpieces The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute.

Scholars have speculated that Mozart left Zaide unfinished (it lacks an overture, a libretto and a finale) because it was, in essence, a self-portrait of the composer as a very young man. The hero is named Gomatz, a partial anagram of “Mozart”; the subject of enslavement hints at Mozart’s impatience to escape musical servitude in his hometown of Salzburg; and the absence of a third act revealing the fate of the captive lovers suggests that Mozart realized that his future as an opera composer was still up for grabs.

I can imagine a witty staging of Zaide that takes place inside the composer’s head and makes a virtue of the work’s patchy charms, leaving its occasionally breathtaking arias and ensembles to speak for themselves—and for the Mozart to come. But this show has been directed by Peter Sellars, an old hand at plucking daisies with a bulldozer.

During the 30 years since he put Handel’s Orlando in a trailer camp and Mozart’s Figaro in the Trump Tower, Mr. Sellars has gone from being an engaging imp to a moralizing scold. This most frail of Mozart’s vessels must now bear the weight not just of Turkish slavery during the Enlightenment, but of slavery in whatever form it exists in today’s world.

To this end, George Tsypin’s shallow, multi-tiered set, which filled the stage at the Rose Theater in the Time Warner Center, presented us with a punishing, neon-lit sweatshop in which a chorus of slaves slept under their sewing machines. Take that, globalization! Mr. Sellars used bombastic music from another early Mozart fragment, his theater music for Thamos, King of Egypt, to create an overture and connective tissue, during which the performers were asked to pantomime brutality, terror, lustfulness, pity and other manifestations of man’s inhumanity to man in poses that belonged on posters, not an opera stage. A dedicated group of non-white (read: politically cast) principals had clearly worked diligently (slavishly?) to master the semaphoric gestures of Mr. Sellars’ didactic naturalism.

For all that, I greatly enjoyed the verve with which Mostly Mozart’s music director, Louis Langrée, led the estimable period-instrument ensemble Concerto Köln through the young genius’ felicitous patchwork of music. And I admired the uniformly excellent singers, especially the true-voiced Zaide of the young Korean-American soprano Hyunah Yu and the rich bass-baritone of Alfred Walker as Allazim, a slave converted to Islam.

But Mr. Sellars no longer seems to know when to leave well enough alone. Whereas he once relied on the music and theatrical images to carry the evening, he now likes to pepper the proceedings with words—most of them his words—lest we miss the point. In a recent interview, he likened Mozart in his political prescience not only to such contemporaries as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin but also to Martin Luther King Jr. In a program note, he writes that with Zaide, Mozart “chose to challenge the world with blazing sincerity in music of deep political conviction.” Hmmm, so that’s why he didn’t finish it. In the lobby, I encountered a table of pamphlets, one of which bore the message “Slavery Still Exists: And It Could Be in Your Backyard.”

No doubt—and no doubt Mr. Sellars’ heart is heavy with the world’s evils. But so, unfortunately, is his hand.

McDougall. HarperCollins, 638 pages, $29.95.

Every chronicle of European settlement of the New World must

include a boat. The boat you choose will shape the story you tell. Start with

the Niña , the Pinta and the Santa Maria ,

and you wind up with explorers, adventurers and Spain's Catholic empire. Start

with the Mayflower , and you wind with

pilgrims, pioneers and New England's religious dissenters. Start with a slave

ship, and you wind up among laborers stolen from Africa. Start among the

European passengers crammed into steerage on an immigrant steamer, and you wind

up-sometimes-with a version of the American dream fulfilled.

In Freedom Just Around the

Corner , the first of a planned three-volume narrative history of the United

States, Walter A. McDougall makes a surprising boat choice. This American

history begins on a Mississippi steamboat, Fidèle ,

the ship of knaves, fools and schemers on which Herman Melville set The Confidence-Man , his dark satire on

mid-19th-century America. Mr. McDougall's America, like Melville's, is a

country of confidence men, rogues, hucksters, impostors, sharks and pretenders.

But the rogues who depressed Melville inspire Mr. McDougall, a

professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the

Pulitzer Prize–winning The Heavens and

the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (1985). According to Mr.

McDougall, the great genius of America has been to harness the human tendency

to hustle and turn it to the ends of nation-building and continental conquest.

"To suggest Americans are, among other things, prone to be hustlers," he

writes, "is not to accord them a nature different or worse than other human

beings. It is simply to acknowledge Americans have enjoyed more opportunity to

pursue their ambitions, by foul means or fair, than any other people in

history."

We know we haven't been equal-opportunity schemers, but in Mr.

McDougall's America, white women and enslaved Africans trick the system too.

That's what makes us Americans. To the nation's founders, other things mattered

too-faith in progress, religious liberty, imperialism, racial hierarchy-but the

country was really born with a hustler's soul. Hustling is what we do best. We

move forward, creating new ideas by corrupting the old. According to Mr.

McDougall, the net result of our "creative corruption" is the country and

culture of the United States, whose creation Mr. McDougall confidently labels

"the central event of the past four hundred years."

Did we need another narrative history of the United States? For

generations we produced them regularly, finding the imp of American success in

geography, technology, demography, mythology, the frontier, good government,

God and good luck. Even with its hard-boiled embrace of the American hustler as

the American type and its title borrowed from Bob Dylan, there's something

old-fashioned about Freedom Just Around

the Corner . Is there really such a thing as "the American character"?

Mr. McDougall thinks so. And with confidence in his confidence

men, he leads us back through the making of America. He retraces the patterns

of settlement, the schemes of European patrons and the imperial aspirations of

European courts. He finds smart Freemasons everywhere. His narrative moves

remarkably from battles on the frontier to battles within Puritan souls, from

diplomatic intrigues in courts and capitals to the complex political

compromises behind the American Constitution. Once the nation is up and

running, Mr. McDougall breaks the flow of his history to present each of the

states admitted after the first 13. In this volume, he offers capsule histories

of Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi,

Illinois, Alabama, Maine and Missouri; in each case, he tests out on a smaller

scale the play of greed, ambition, aspiration and hard work that made the

nation as a whole.

Mr. McDougall also spotlights a cast of favorite American

hustlers whose portraits he sketches with wonderful economy. He likes a

particular kind of hard-working, clever, self-inventing character: the

itinerant preacher George Whitefield; the ubiquitous Ben Franklin; or, perhaps

nearest his heart, the "thinking, drinking, laughing, slovenly country lawyer,"

Chief Justice John Marshall, and the brilliant Alexander Hamilton, who knew to

"fashion government so as to encourage

individual greed for money, power, and prestige under sturdy legal procedures

that do not dictate what people

should strive for, but only how they

must play the game." A few women make it into this group: the clever and

seductive Caty Greene, wife of Revolutionary War General Nathanael Greene and

first patron of Eli Whitney; and the outspoken traveler Anne Newport Royall.

But he's no friend to Thomas Jefferson, a man who appears in

these pages as a lazy, selfish, cowardly hypocrite-a

quartet of vices which combine to exclude him from Mr. McDougall's pantheon of

"creative corruption." Jefferson's creativity was never sufficient, in Mr.

McDougall's mind, to redeem his corruption: He ducked service in the

Revolutionary War, never faced the truth about slavery, and exaggerated his own

cleverness. Mr. McDougall won't even allow him the Declaration of Independence:

"the original passages in Jefferson's draft declaration were not good, while

the good ones were not very original."

Mr. McDougall is a witty writer and a brilliant and opinionated

historian. He has devoured several decades' worth of scholarship and digested

the articles and monographs into compact arguments and telling anecdotes. His

footnotes sometimes are as interesting as his text, although the dramas staged

at the back of the book are about writing history, not the making of nations.

Freedom Just Around the

Corner is an impressive accomplishment. But I believe it's worth quarreling

with Mr. McDougall's neo-Federalist version of American history. He warns

against a naïve reading that holds the past to present standards, dismissing

those who fault the Founding Fathers for ignoring the needs of Native

Americans, women and slaves. Indeed, as he puts it, "the roles scripted for

women and imposed on Indians and blacks during the founding were necessary

supports for the advances in civil liberty Americans did achieve. Once that

subtle, ironic insight sinks in, much of nineteenth-century American history

begins to make sense as well." I'm not sure this insight is so subtle, but

perhaps it's Mr. McDougall's way of acknowledging that although freedom is

always "just around the corner" for everyone, that corner promises to be far

easier to turn for some than for others. If that promise of freedom is just

another of the con man's come-ons, then Mr. McDougall has taken his ironic

realism too far.

But it's not the lack of idealism that disturbs me most about

this volume. It's that Mr. McDougall sees so little downside to his hustler's

schemes and plots. Perhaps these plots worked well for the first 250 years of

conquest, when Europeans and Euro-Americans worked their way across the

continent, killing off Indians, making Africans work, building towns and

factories, and fashioning a system of government that turned individual greed

into common good.

But what happens when the great creative work is done, when the

magic that turns vice into virtue no longer functions? Perhaps we should

consider some alternatives to Mr. McDougall's heroic hustlers: other, better

sides to the American character and a different, more varied cast. Some of us

may be as Mr. McDougall imagines us to be-ironic, hard-headed capitalists whose

vices have become virtues in the marketplace. But I like to think there are

Americans who have tried to hold to ideas and to fashion institutions outside

the voracious, all-consuming market. Mr. McDougall may need these other

Americans if he wants a moral compass for the next volumes of his history, when

his "free people" begin to feel the consequences of choosing always the

short-term prospects, when his good country faces the truths about slavery and

goes to war, when his creative capitalists begin to see environmental waste,

and when arrogance dismisses the subtle arts of diplomacy.

Ann Fabian teaches American studies and history

at Rutgers University.

Nevertheless, there was a time not so long ago when everybody including the future Vice President's wife, Lynne Cheney, had an opinion about the nation's history curriculum. Conservatives argued that fuzzy social studies had turned history into just another exercise in group grievance and slighted the accomplishments of some of the nation's founders. Liberals argued that U.S. history ought to be something more than merely memorizing the deeds of dead white men. When some curricula seemed to sacrifice Great White Men on the altar of political correctness, holy hell followed.

While I'm not an academic, I occasionally play one on TV. Being true to the spirit of this avocation, I felt strongly both ways about the curriculum wars. History is not, as Richard Nixon and others contended, merely biography. Ordinary people, whose biographies will never be written, changed the course of history just as surely as any Great White Man when they marched for civil rights, for women's suffrage, for the right to join unions. Then again, there are some biographies every school kid ought to know, even if they seem skewed toward dead white men.

Years after the professors duked it out in the pages of the mainstream press, there is some evidence to suggest that we are, in fact, educating a generation of students to feel proud to be a part of their racial/ethnic/religious group, while teaching them next to nothing about history. Indeed, judging by the information and oh-so-cautious language in my kid's fourth-grade history textbook ( Exploring Our Land, published by Houghton Mifflin), I fear for the future.

Imagine, for example, explaining the Berlin Wall to a bunch of 10-year-olds without mentioning the Soviet Union, the United States or the word "oppression." Well, the non-judgmental authors of Exploring Our Land have managed that trick. They write that in 1945, "a group of countries" divided up Germany. "However, people kept trying to leave East Berlin." Why? The book doesn't say. Besides, people move around all the time-what's the big deal anyway? But 28 years later, the book informs young minds, "the people of East Germany changed their government … they decided to remove the boundary between East and West Berlin."

Freedom, oppression-whatever! It is curious that the authors would choose not to mention the depredations visited upon East Berlin-thus causing the pre-Wall flight-for they certainly pull no punches in describing the evils of slavery in America and of white resistance to the civil-rights movement. This is how it should be-which makes the bland, who-are-we-to-judge passage about the Berlin Wall all the more curious.

The book, incidentally, bears the imprimatur of a host of scholars associated with several religious and ethnic organizations, including the Council on Islamic Education, the periodical Hinduism Today, the Institute of Buddhist Studies and the East Asian Institute. This is very worthy indeed, but represents a certain kind of inclusion that most people would recognize as intellectually dishonest.

Given the nation's traditional heritage and even its current demographics, you might expect the vetters to include a distinguished professor for Judeo-Christian studies, or a renowned expert in European-American or African-American history. Yes, it's wonderful that the text passed muster with the Council on Islamic Education. But why not the Anti-Defamation League, too?

Then again, what can one expect from a text which defines a republic as a nation in which "people can vote for new representatives"? This shocking bit of ignorance no doubt would sadden the Founders. Republic, constitutional monarchy, commonwealth-whatever!

An ongoing radio campaign for the Bank of New York also seems to be evidence of historical illiteracy, as it features an actor playing Alexander Hamilton urging Thomas Jefferson to include the right to free checking as the 11th Amendment. "But I thought we agreed that 10 was a nice round number," the voice of Jefferson replies. Gotcha, you say: Thomas Jefferson didn't write the Bill of Rights. He wrote that other thing-you know, the Declaration of Independence thing. In high dudgeon, I confronted the bank's spokesman, Kevin Heine, with this appalling example of the end of the world as we know it. "Don't you know that James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights, not Thomas Jefferson?" I said, imagining myself as an earnest adviser to a children's social-studies textbook.

He laughed. "We're well aware of the historical inaccuracy regarding Jefferson," he said. Ah, so this was a willful display of ignorance!

Well, maybe not.

"We also are aware that the right to free checking was never considered as the 11th Amendment," Mr. Heine said. "We were just having a little fun."

A little fun? Right-that's another thing missing from the social-studies curriculum.

Marco Masotti made partner at one of the top New York City law firms, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, at the age of 32. That may be reason enough for his colleagues in the infested waters of corporate law to take to the shark cage.

But the 35-year-old Mr. Masotti-who has presided over the creation of more than $16 billion in private investment funds and cut deals on behalf of industry behemoths like Brown Brothers Harriman, the Wicks Group, Carlyle Asset Management and AIG-is also chair of his own New York City Bar Association committee. That allows him to weigh in on the big and controversial matters of his industry, like the S.E.C.'s new regulations for hedge funds.

"A committee of the city bar is listened to, and therefore Marco is," said Robert Hirsh, the founding partner of Paul Weiss' private investment-funds division. "And what was obvious once he began [the committee] was that all of the major lawyers in this practice wanted to be on it: It's a Who's Who of people in our business."

Mr. Masotti wasn't always destined for the corporate towers of midtown Manhattan. Growing up in apartheid-era South Africa, the son of an Italian toolmaker and a South African mother, he marched against the regime. As he tells it, the only reason he decided to head to the U.S. in 1991 was to study at the University of Virginia Law School, learn the secrets of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and then bring them back to South Africa.

But after a year on a Fulbright scholarship, he fell in love with a New York–bound J.D., now his wife, Tracy, and followed her to New York, where he took a job at Paul Weiss. Before long, he found his negotiating talents eclipsing his interest in full-time do-gooding.

Mr. Masotti wondered if he "sold out," but generally consoled himself that a "corporate career will breed contacts and resources that will allow me to one day make a meaningful difference in the area of human rights." His background may explain why he's chairman of the board of Shared Interest, a nonprofit group that provides loan guarantees to small businesses in his native South Africa.

"I'm working constantly," Mr. Masotti said, his lanky body scrunched into a chair. Behind him sat framed photos of his three kids, ages 1, 4 and 6 years old; to his right, a picture of himself with Nelson Mandela and Sheila Sisulu, South Africa's U.S. ambassador, smiling broadly.

If his work seems like a jumble of killer instinct and do-gooder ethos, it all makes sense to him. He creates hedge funds, funds of funds, buyout funds, venture-capital funds and distressed funds on behalf of banks, pension funds, insurance companies and other clients so they can turn around and orchestrate leveraged buyouts. Or, he said, launch a development project in Africa. Or create a new technology company. Each fund is an elaborate web of dozens, if not hundreds, of investors from around the globe. Mr. Masotti has to shepherd all these investors toward a final, lucrative deal. "It's diplomacy through and through," he said. "In many ways, the lawyer is the driver of these pools of capital, and these pools are in many ways the drivers of the American economy."

These funds "are the structures that you run your business on for a decade a more," said Glenn August, co-founder and president of specialist asset managers Oak Hill Advisors, for which Mr. Masotti has helped raise more than $4 billion. Mr. August said he believed Mr. Masotti would "become one of a handful of leading lawyers that large clients look to for advice, like a Marty Lipton or Joe Flom or Felix Rohatyn."

- Lizzy Ratner

Fit for a Founding Father

"Any questions about the menu?" asked the waiter.

I should have said, "Pull up a chair!"

Black edamame ravioli with ginko nut, pork shank with gobo root, and snapper with coconut candlenut foam are just some of the dishes on the menu at this new West Village restaurant. Its namesake, Thomas Jefferson, would have been intrigued. He was no stranger to "new American cuisine": He introduced French cooking to Virginia, along with weird vegetables such as broccoli and endive, and he ate tomatoes grown in his garden at a time when most people considered them poison apples.

The chef and owner of Jefferson restaurant, Simpson Wong, is a native of Malaysia with Chinese ancestry. For the past seven years, he's been serving authentic Pacific Rim dishes at Café Asean, the popular bistro café he owns two doors down. Now, with his new restaurant, he has cast his net far and wide-all over the world, in fact. His ambitions are high. That much is clear from the moment you walk in.

The façade of the restaurant is made entirely of glass. The staff at the front desk must have many hilarious moments watching the Marcel Marceau pantomime as people try to figure out which panel is the door. The restaurant is designed by architect Philip Wu, who worked for I.M. Pei before founding his own company, and he has created a beautiful, spare, streamlined space. The bar and lounge look across to the gardens of the Jefferson Market Library, where the Women's House of Detention once stood (prisoners used to yell through the bars at people coming out of the corner bakery, "Hey, baby! Is that cake for me?"). One wall of the dining room is covered with frosted glass, another with white acoustic tile. The third wall is covered with the same French white oak that's on the floor, extending up to a sloping ceiling with three skylights. Recessed light boxes cast a soft glow over the beige banquettes and the tables, which are set with white paper over linen and floating candles. The only busy detail is a huge spray of cherry blossoms by the bar. But the serenity of the room is shattered from time to time when one of the fire trucks from the station down the block comes hurtling past, lights flashing red through the picture window, sirens full blast.

Everyone looks good against the pale walls, and since most people are dressed in black, they stand out like silhouettes. The deuces along the banquettes are close together, so you can't avoid overhearing your neighbors' conversations. Next to me one evening, two blond men out on their first date were sharing a small plate of yellowtail sashimi.

"The trouble with Stacey is his dogs-they're like his friends," said one of the men.

"I'm not good with small dogs," replied his companion. "When a dog sits on my lap, I like to know it's there."

On my other side, a young man in a gray polo shirt and a striking woman with flaming red lips and a shock of dark curls were having a nonstop conversation. When the man left for the bathroom, the woman looked at me and beamed. "We're on a blind date!" she said, "A friend of my mother's fixed us up!"

If nothing else, the food at Jefferson would have provided them with a talking point, starting with the sliver of roasted eel on a crisp potato galette the size of a quarter that's sent out as an "amuse bouche." Mr. Wong is a self-taught chef; he learned to cook by helping his mother prepare meals for his father's small timber company in the remote reaches of the rain forest in Malaysia. His chef de cuisine, Todd Wann, has cooked in France and has worked at Vong, Tabla and Bright Food Shop. Mr. Wong has come up with many intriguing ideas.

There are odd pairings, such as grilled tuna with foie gras, a dish I disliked when I had it at Patricia Yeo's Pazo in midtown. But Mr. Wong makes the combination work by using toro (fatty tuna) that's cut thin so it heats right through and melts over the top of the foie gras like butter. Slices of roasted quince underneath provide a sweet accent, and a sauce made with honey and Japanese peppercorns adds a note of spice. Another strange duo is tuna tartare and seared duck breast, which are served side by side. The tuna is very fresh and hand-cut, but underseasoned. In the middle of the plate is a dollop of lemony yuzu vinaigrette that goes with the fish but not the duck breast, which seems out of place here.

Nor does seared monkfish seem at home on an oxtail raviolo. I know it's a classic combination-monkfish with a meaty red wine sauce-but here, it's the raviolo that's the focus. It's a lovely green floppy one, stuffed with oxtail in a sauce with maitake (Japanese mushrooms) and mitsuba (a mild Japanese cilantro), and the monkfish just gets in the way. Braised pork shank is lovely, soft and silken with chestnuts and gobo root (a Japanese root like a skinny salsify). But does it need quail eggs, too? It's rich enough already. And snow peas are just fidgety: There are too many ideas on the plate.

The simpler and more focused the dish, the better it is. The yellowtail (the foie gras of sashimi) is one of the best things on the menu, served with slivers of Asian pear, preserved lemon, capers and chive oil. The two men next to me were putting their new relationship to the test by sharing it. I could have eaten two platefuls on my own. The diver scallops are also good. They come with a rice flake crust, braised endive and a white miso tangerine sauce with strands of saffron. All the elements come together: the bitterness of the endive, the sweetness of the tangerine, the saltiness of the miso and the crunch of the rice on the tender scallops.

Caramelized persimmon is cut in a shape like a mosquito coil over the snapper, which comes on a foamy coconut sauce with roasted candlenuts (which are from Thailand and taste like pistachios). Baby leeks and enoki are served on the side. It's excellent, and so is the seared branzino fillet topped with an herb salad and placed on a heap of artichokes, sunchokes and fennel. A lobster lemongrass reduction is both rich and astringent.

The wine list is interesting and offers many good choices, but it's very expensive. There are only two reds and six whites under $40. The Grüner Veltliner (a white), for $27, goes very well with this food.

Desserts are by Jacqueline Zion, who was formerly at Bond Street. Forget the gummy potstickers and try the molten chocolate cake with mascarpone ice cream, or the banana bread pudding with a bittersweet chocolate rum sauce and great creamy macadamia ice cream. The chrysanthemum panna cotta is perfect, matched with a warm lemon-pear compote.

Halfway through dinner, I noticed all the tables in the dining room were full. My neighbor (the one who is good with small dogs) had just finished his branzino. "I don't know what that was, but it was very good," he said. "This place is going to be a hit."

It's easy to forget that many aspects of the American past were as messy as the present of "failed states" that we're engaged with now. I was in Afghanistan when I read Greenback , Jason Goodwin's history of the American dollar. There, where three different sorts of local money-besides dollars and Pakistani rupees-are in circulation, the confusions of the early history of American currency don't seem so distant, or so improbable.

We have mainly forgotten the many inconveniences of monetary transactions in the early days of the Republic. Mr. Goodwin makes them vivid: the myriad local banks, whose currency was good only in the vicinity; the chronic lack of small change that increased the cost of daily needs; the widespread use of Spanish, French and British money up through the Civil War. Most of us, with our dim ancestral recollections of a past of silver dollars, probably never knew that Massachusetts issued paper money before any European state, in 1691.

Mr. Goodwin, whose earlier books include a well-received study of the Ottoman Empire, Lords of the Horizons , gets at the essential point early: Americans accepted paper money readily because its artificiality made sense to those whose newborn society was also an artificial transplant. Still, until the 20th century, paper money had influential opponents who fought a passionate, losing battle for a currency issued in, or at least exchangeable for, gold or silver.

To entice us into this essentially abstract subject matter, Mr. Goodwin focuses on the men who tugged our currency this way and that. His brief biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are especially apt, the sketch of Alexander Hamilton more perfunctory. Mr. Goodwin brings to light the forgotten achievements of Jacob Perkins, whose success at foiling counterfeiters in 1804 made the dollar secure; Nicholas Biddle, president of the Second Bank of the United States; his populist enemy, Andrew Jackson; Lafayette Baker, founder of what became the Secret Service; and many more, up through William Jennings Bryan.

Franklin was an early advocate of paper money, and Mr. Goodwin makes a vivid case for his importance, dimmed for a century by his calculating morality. Franklin argued that the expansion of the money supply by paper would lead to an increase in the price of land and encourage people to spend their money rather than hoard it for the interest it would bear. Lower interest rates, in turn, would encourage the opening of new businesses.

The American Revolution can be partly laid to the cause of paper money. At the very beginning of the Declaration of Independence are two little-noticed complaints blaming Parliament for ignoring laws enacted by colonial governments. The laws in question authorized printing money. The colonists had long printed paper money to pay for the cost of the French and Indian wars, and the British had tolerated the practice. But by 1764, when the British finally banned paper money, Canada had been secured and the Indian threat subdued. That this currency increased the prosperity of the colonies interested the home country not at all; the point of the colonies was to provide cheap natural resources, period.

Since the colonies had no money with which to wage war, they simply printed it: the now-infamous Continentals. As Mr. Goodwin points out, these were the earliest symbols of the United States. Creating its own money was the first act of the infant confederation-which goes some way toward explaining the American preoccupation with money that Europeans always remark. Mr. Goodwin comments that in times of economic or political stress, Americans tended to blame money itself, arguing for paper or for silver dollars, as the crisis of the moment suggested.

After Franklin, Mr. Goodwin turns to Jefferson, an early opponent of a paper currency. Though he argued against paper money on the grounds of its potential to corrupt, Jefferson was himself perpetually in debt. He tried freeing some of his slaves in his will, but his heirs sold them to pay creditors. It was nonetheless Jefferson who decimalized our money (except for the quarter, a legacy of the practice of physically splitting larger coins for scarce change).

From here on, the story is about ubiquitous counterfeiters, wildcat banks, bank runs and bank failures. Some of Mr. Goodwin's best anecdotes date from this era: Louis Remme's heroic horseback ride of 1855 to redeem $12,000 in gold that he had deposited in a bank in danger of failing, for example, and the exploits of the fabulously talented counterfeiters Taylor and Brendell. (From a jail cell in 1896, they used a homemade photographic emulsion and the light from a barred window to create a counterfeit plate that experts later thought had been made with an eight-ton press.)

It's almost with a sense of wistfulness that we read of the closing of the dollar frontier with the defeat of the Populists, the 1873 omission of the silver dollar from the list of accepted currency and the adoption, in 1890, of a gold standard. The Wizard of Oz , Mr. Goodwin reminds us, is thought by some to chronicle these struggles. He also makes the interesting point that the dollar reveals an unexpected conservative streak in American culture: The currency's appearance was frozen in 1929; 19th-century notes are still legal tender; and the $2 bill was a flop. Any further changes in our currency are likely to be in the direction of its disappearance, as electronic money replaces the paper item.

A Briton living in London, Mr. Goodwin observes our culture from a useful remove. The price to the American reader is the occasional false note that an editor should have tuned to the proper pitch: Mr. Goodwin refers to land being "platted" and Cotton Mather's "laager mentality," and talks of slavery expanding to the Southwest: "Alabama, Florida, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee." And where can he have found the evidence for the claim that among the things the English have sold to Americans are "computers" and "the Net"? These are quibbles, though. Jason Goodwin's thoughtful meditation on what Americans have made of the dollar, and what it has made of us, rings as true as the silver we've banished. Greenback offers many suggestive asides and some screen-worthy stories along the way. And especially in this time of financial unease, it's useful to be reminded that the impeccable dollar we take for granted had a long, hard birth.

Ann Marlowe is the author of

How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z (Anchor).

With our own modest or nonexistent portfolios, we are in the happy position of being tourists rather than natives to the country of high-finance finagling. The bad guys are getting it; better yet, the more extensive the wrongdoing, the more likely that heads will roll, that "systemic" changes will be made. Yet, delightful as it has been to find inarguable evidence of the villainy we'd long suspected, something in this chorus of virtuous revulsion has made me uncomfortable.

I've been doing some historical research lately, and I keep hearing echoes of this Schadenfreude in the words of some eminent literary tourists of the last century-namely Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles Dickens-over the economic misfortunes of my home state of Virginia. Despising the institution of slavery (and, in de Tocqueville's case, the landed aristocracy), they were downright jubilant at the sorry state of Virginia's economy.

De Tocqueville was as much a cheerleader for (and idealizer of) the stern probity and industry of Northerners as he was against what he perceived as the idleness and frivolity of the slave- and land-owning Virginia aristocracy-themselves, he gleefully pointed out, descendants of blue-blooded bad sheep who'd been happily shipped off by their families in England. At roughly the same point in time (in 1827), Fanny Trollope, the free-thinking novelist and mother of Anthony, arrived in America with utopian fantasies of her own. But after disillusioning experiences-a brief sojourn in a muddy, bug-infested progressive community, followed by the failure of a grandiose commercial scheme in Cincinnati-her view turned sour, and all she found was further evidence of the boorishness of America and its institutions. Having abandoned her 12-year-old son to the untender mercies of his intemperate and impecunious father, Mrs. T. wept over the treatment of slave children in Virginia. The book she wrote, Domestic Manners of the Americans , a slash-and-burn exposé, was a best-seller in England.

Dickens, on the trip that produced American Notes and Pictures from Italy (both 1842), had initially hoped to tweak and perhaps outsell his older colleague and friendly rival with a more salubrious portrait of the new country-but that was not to be.

With his nose for injustice and his genius for dramatizing and humanizing the plight of the oppressed, Dickens was more interested in prisons and poorhouses than signs of progress. After all, on his visit to Pennsylvania, after a cursory look at the historic sites, he went to the horrifyingly brutal Eastern Penitentiary and was inspired to savage eloquence by his reformer's zeal. Didn't all these writers see what they wanted to see, discover ammunition for novelistic or ideological predispositions already firmly in place? And for Dickens and Trollope, wasn't there a lingering-if unconscious-resentment of this upstart nation's victory over the powerful mother country?

In any case, Virginians have never gotten over the vilifications of Dickens, who was wined and dined in a style befitting the great man and then turned on his hosts with a keenly observant eye for the signs of misery beneath the façade.

Voyaging from Washington through Fredericksburg to Richmond by night steamer and by coach, in conditions that were at the very least uncomfortable and at the worst life-threatening, Dickens took perverse satisfaction in the "ruin and decay" that signalled the exhaustion of the soil by the slave system. "Dreary and uninteresting as its aspect is, I was glad to the heart to find anything on which one of the curses of this horrible institution has fallen; and had greater pleasure in contemplating the withered ground, than the richest and most thriving cultivation in the same place could possibly have afforded me," he wrote.

Dickens' host in Richmond was a good man and, to his relief, not a buyer or seller of slaves, though he owned and employed them in his tobacco factory. Like the guest from hell, Dickens was the kind of snoop who peers under the rugs. He observed the factory workers and sought out the poorer neighborhoods, looking for signs of moldering spirits. They were the very slums that we, growing up in a later century, tried to keep at the back of our consciousness. In the 50's and 60's, not so much had changed: Dickens' wry observations on mint juleps and sherry cobblers and deferential black waiters held true for these staples of our debutante years.

But what Dickens and de Tocqueville missed were the paradoxes: How was it that this miserable state had produced such farsighted revolutionaries as George Mason, George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe and Thomas Jefferson-had, in effect, given us the Constitution? In his superb book American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia , the historian Edmund Morgan provides a complex portrait of the ups and downs of Virginia's government and economy: its boom years of greed (stemming from tobacco), the seesawing between protecting and restricting individual rights, and the state's resort to slavery in the late 17th century, when freed servants posed a threat of rebellion. Growing up in conditions in which slaves and free men intermingled, Jefferson worried that young Virginians must inevitably be tutored in tyranny with the example of such despotism before them.

"The man must be a prodigy," Mr. Morgan quotes Jefferson as saying, "who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances." If so, there were many prodigies in Virginia: men who, while complicit in the slave trade, were hardly depraved, and managed to retain manners and morals enough to suppress private disagreements and design the Constitution around the central belief in human freedom. The ultimate irony, Mr. Morgan suggests, is that it may have been precisely this concrete spectacle of bondage in their backyards, of men treated like chattel, that fired their ideas of independence and passion for liberty.

Even then, the drafters of the Constitution knew slavery had to be abolished, but so fragile was their hold on the union itself (their first order of business) that they didn't dare raise so divisive an issue at the time. What they had, what the great Presidents like Roosevelt had, was a combination of political acumen and farsightedness.

But now, with the instant-gratification impulse that rules our lives and our economy, nobody ever remembers (or wants to remember) while the times are good that boom is followed by bust. State governments go on drunken sprees of projects and commitments and then are surprised by the head-splitting hangover of money shortfalls. I did not have to be "persuaded" of the phenomenon by the Bad Guys, as the authors of we/them readings of the current crisis like to put it. As a "little investor," my investment was tiny enough, but I too was caught up in the same "irrational exuberance," perhaps even the same "infectious greed," that had others shifting from bonds to stocks like there was no tomorrow. Maybe that's just it: We no longer believe there is a tomorrow, which is a consequence of our inability to listen to history. You need a sense of the past to believe in the future, and you must believe in the future as a shared proposition to have any hope of making it better.

Such was the situation on a recent three-day jaunt, when I "took the waters" with my husband, brother and sister-in-law at the Homestead-the grande dame of hotels-in the vernal mountains of western Virginia. The oldest continuously operating resort in the U.S., built (in 1766) near bubbling hot sulfur springs which fill the spa pool and calm the nerves; a golfing paradise of Presidents and royalty-the place casts a long and enticing shadow over my childhood. Once a wooden hotel built by a friend of George Washington's from the Virginia militia, and now a huge brick structure (the same that I knew in my youth), it was a magical kingdom. It wasn't just that it was too pricey for my family (though it was). In those days, only the very rich took their children to expensive resorts, where the kids could be palmed off on swimming teachers and tennis pros, or sequestered in special nurseries and playgrounds-gilt-edged ghettos of noise and hyperactivity that allowed the golden rule of silence to maintain elsewhere. It's no longer that way; children are ubiquitous-a fly in the ointment?

Now an attentive staff was serving us tea in the great hall, off the plantation-like porte-cochere. But at least there were no personal servants (the Duke and Duchess of Windsor came with 12) to unpack our suitcases, lay out our clothes. (Though I could have used some in New York when I went through a frenzy of decision-making over what to bring.) The place is loaded with history: Thomas Edison was responsible for the hotel's first electric-power plant, the theater was built in 1922 to show silent movies, and the golf course sported the

oldest first tee in the country. Wilson honey-mooned here, and McKinley and Eisenhower trod the links. A special gallery houses portraits of the 20 Presidents who've visited. (Bush I and II were missing, as was J.F.K.; but the Bouviers came with little Jackie.) At the fabulous breakfast buffet one

morning, the Virginia governor was piling high his plate, as were other members of the Democratic Caucus.

On the second evening, the four of us took a champagne-sipping, horse-driven carriage ride around the grounds at the speed (5 m.p.h.) with which the plutocracy of old had hightailed it from one resort to another. Our tobacco-chewing driver was out of a Cormac McCarthy novel. Almost unintelligible when he spoke, he nevertheless picked up every word we said, and interrupted our conversation about movies.

"I saw that movie The Horse Whisperer," he said, curling

his lip. "That Robert Redford-he didn't know how to talk-whisper to horses. He only knew how to flirt-whisper to women."

By the end of the second day, as our muscles were forced to relax under the ministrations of body whisperers, Weltschmerz threatened to engulf us. Desperate for something to enable us, in David Lodge's phrase, "to keep abreast of the global gloom," my husband and I turned to CNN, where experts were gleefully dissecting the Utah teen snatch-a story that hadn't even made the Virginia papers-pondering the significance of the age of the child (14) and her sister (9), and declaring the culprit a "preferential molester" rather than a pedophile.

Perhaps, I hoped, a book from the hotel's extensive stock would both soothe and stimulate. My heart had leapt when, walking down the endless corridor to our room, we'd come upon bookcases stuffed with offerings. But on closer inspection, there wasn't an author or title I recognized-not even on the more copious shelves of the Washington Library. The books had probably been bought by the yard sometime in the 50's. I investigated the newspaper boutique and found in its cramped space, along with Alka Seltzer, Band-Aids, deodorant and a smattering of best-sellers, 33 books about golf! There were also golf puzzles, souvenirs and assorted golfabilia. Now I've nothing against golf-it draws people to the courses and away from my chosen recreation areas (hot pool, cold pool)-but at some of these places the sport borders on a cult, with menus listing items like Eggs Hole in One and T-bone in the Rough.

In an attempt to relieve my anxiety, I headed for the pool. In my harried packing, I hadn't brought my bathing cap. I went to one shop after another without success. Partly as an antidote to inertia, I turned the search for a replacement into research into the disappearance of what I discovered is an ancient form of aquatic headgear. I'm not speaking of those little rubber Speedos, contraceptives for the head that pull your hair and pinch your scalp but produce the androgynous and bullet-headed look of a professional swimmer. I'm talking thick white caps with under-the-chin straps that snap and come in assorted colors, sometimes with pert little rubber flowers that come off with the first big wave.

I'd noticed for a few years that I was having a hard time buying the things, but I thought each drugstore had simply run out of stock. It wasn't until the 20-year-old daughter of a swimming friend told her mother that we looked like two old ladies in our bathing caps that I realized the truth: The bathing cap as I knew it was an extinct species, a 50's artifact, as out-of-date as the hair maintenance that went with it. (We had hairdos and, when we weren't at the beauty parlor, we were spending hours frying our roller-bedecked heads under drying bonnets.)

So, capless, I went to the Jefferson Pool and, for the first time that week, felt truly and sublimely at one, body and mind-immersed in watery history, adrift in time. The pool, or pools (there's an adjacent men's pool, and the two are still segregated), is filled continually by body-temperature water from the sulfur springs (yes, there's a slight whiff of fertilizer when you enter) and housed inside a primitive wooden structure that has a ramp and minimalist dressing rooms, sort of like Girl Scout camp. The water is four feet deep, clear aquamarine in color, with stones on the bottom, as it was when a 75-year-old Thomas Jefferson came in 1818 to take the waters for his rheumatism and, celebrity that he was, put the pool on the spa map. Now you lie on a Styrofoam "noodle" and feel a gentle breeze from the partially opened roof skylight. I blissed out in a way I've never done in yoga or at a spa. It only costs $12, as opposed to a hundred here and there for various forms of being "done" to. There, in the pool, I realized that it was the being done to that made me nervous-not the pampering, per se. I loved floating entirely my own, in complete silence, in a tiny world that hadn't changed an iota since 1818. Did Jefferson remove his wig, don a cap or dunk the peruke? For one precious hour, I felt closer to T.J. than to J. Lo.

In the 19th century, New York bustled and swelled, new buildings sprouted like weeds, de-rusticated bumpkins made fortunes trying their luck in the city and impoverished foreign immigrants started new lives, far away from the medieval demons chasing them out of their huts and across the Atlantic. Or so the story goes. The truth, of course, is more complicated–which is another way of saying the truth is much worse. A great many people did not improve their lot in life by coming to New York. Amidst all the building and Babbittry attending the city's expansion, one neighborhood grew into a dark and scary place that gave the lie to the grinning rhetoric of the American dream–a black hole beside the rising sun of prosperity. The neighborhood was known simply as Five Points–after an awkward intersection formed by three extinct streets (Orange, Anthony and Cross) in what is now Chinatown. As America's first slum, it sat at an important crossroads.

Five Points has been brought back to life by Tyler Anbinder, a historian who made forays for lo mein in Chatham Square when he was a Columbia University grad student–he's been hooked on the area ever since. He borrows his geographical definition from 1873 ("the area originally comprehended under the term Five Points is bounded by Canal Street, the Bowery, Chatham, Pearl and Centre Streets, forming a truncated triangle about one mile square"), but his sprawling book ventures far beyond these strict boundaries to explore a state of mind that evolved in America's toughest 19th-century 'hood.

Unlike the Lower East Side, which inherited its reputation, Five Points is not generally known to modern New Yorkers. At the end of the 19th century, following the photojournalistic exposés of Jacob Riis, the slum was Haussmannized out of existence. It was quickly forgotten, except by diligent researchers into New York's shadows–Herbert Asbury and Luc Sante spring to mind. But at the height of its infamy, it exerted a power of such force over writers that none of them, foreign or otherwise, could quite specify its terror. In 1834, the New York Sun described "a state of misery almost indescribable," which upon closer examination emanated from 1) bad smells and 2) interracial sex, the great bugbear of 19th-century America. In 1849, the Tribune called it "the great central ulcer of wretchedness." A journalist who sounds like he lived in my last apartment described a typical lodging: "without air, without light, filled with damp vapor from the mildewed walls, and with vermin in ratio to the dirtiness of the inhabitants, they are the most repulsive holes that ever a human being was forced to sleep in." The Scandinavian writer Fredrika Bremer opined that "lower than to the Five Points it is not possible for human nature to sink." The immortal Dickens put it best: "[A]ll that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here."

Five Points began, appropriately, as a swamp. In the 18th century, New York's slaughterhouses clustered around a lake called the Collect (many of New York's finest families, including Astors, Schermerhorns and Lorillards, trace their wealth to their first slumlord purchases here). The Collect was filled in by 1813, but the stench attached to the neighborhood remained. By 1830, it was a center for prostitution and urban squalor. The houses were poorly built, the dampness of the ground rotted everything, and the concentration of all these evils was at Five Points itself, where no light seemed to escape and danger lurked around every corner, either from criminals or lethal disease. Many of the Irish who were coming to New York in droves settled here, in "the dirtiest Ward of the dirtiest City in the world."

The neighborhood really hit its stride in the decades leading up to and including the Civil War. The inhabitants, overwhelmingly foreign-born, found political expression in two ways. First, they rioted a lot, terrifying uptown Manhattanites. Second, they figured out how to achieve the same ends by simply stealing elections–they sent obstinate champions to city and state government. Using eyewitness accounts, Mr. Anbinder convincingly reenacts some of the more violent insurrections of the period, including the great riots of 1857 and 1863. It's fascinating to see writers and politicians grappling with a new social reality that had nothing to do with Jefferson's dream of an Arcadian republic. Southerners pointed to the Five Points to suggest that slavery wasn't so bad. Wealthy New Yorkers pretended the problem didn't exist. Both were wrong.

The book, like the neighborhood, changes direction with the approach of the 20th century, as new types of immigrants flooded through Ellis Island. In the 1880's, Italians replaced the Irish, who treated them about as despicably as they themselves had been treated. This was the period made famous by Riis, with his riveting photographs of overcrowding in "Bandits' Roost," "Bottle Alley" and other places near Mulberry Bend. Then the even more foreign Chinese secured a foothold they have yet to surrender, and word trickled back to the villages of China that there was a fabulous country called "Mott Street" where wizards cast spells that made you very rich. Mr. Anbinder describes the Italian and Chinese occupations with less energy, but the story stays interesting to the end–if, indeed, we've reached the end.

To his credit, Mr. Anbinder takes on more than just a chronology of a neighborhood. In fact, a conventional historian would argue that he's bitten off much more than he can chew, a fact that's immediately apparent from the book's run-on title–he crams it all in. Though there were not yet Ashcan painters, old haunts like "Squeeze Gut Alley" come alive through diary entries and contemporary journalism. Long-dead New Yorkers walk on- and offstage, different and yet utterly recognizable. In smoky bars like Dooley's Long-Room, political careers were launched and squelched. It's hard not to like the tough but dandyish Bowery B'hoys, Hedwigian glam rockers before their time. Even Abe Lincoln makes an appearance: During a campaign swing in 1860, he gave a touching speech to orphans about his own poverty when he was a child. Along with the criminal elements, there were legions of reformers, documentary photographers and church groups trying in their ways to "save" Five Points. One hot spot was the "Industrial House for the Friendless, the Inebriate, and the Outcast." Faith-based charities were the worst, squabbling eternally with rival denominations. (Even then, New York was sect-crazed.)

I like Mr. Anbinder's voracious approach, though the way he shifts from an academic to a breezy tone will irritate purists. The "prologues" before each chapter, intended to whet our appetite, are merely distracting. I'd have enjoyed more on race relations in Five Points–we hear about great black dancers (Savion Glover cited one Five Pointer, Master Juba, as an inspiration), and also about outrageous acts of cruelty toward African-Americans, but these stories are not tied together. Mr. Anbinder could have thought harder about the parasitic relationship between the new penny papers of the 1830's and the lurid conditions they described. On a couple occasions, he surrenders to the urge to idealize in a silly Ken Burns-ian way. But Five Points is not Jazz , or Thomas Jefferson or Baseball . It's about something far more American: the Darwinian survival of the fittest, and the importance of crushing your enemy before he crushes you. That lesson is important–especially since we're not allowed to teach Darwin in vast stretches of George W. Bush's America.

There's a line in the film Ghost World where Enid and Rebecca debate whether something is so bad it's good or so bad it's gone past good to bad again. Clearly, Mr. Anbinder feels that this bad place is good to the extent that it illuminates certain truths about the New York experience. He's right–and others will surely agree. The more New York cleans itself up, the stronger the pull of its unvarnished past. The New-York Historical Society has a new exhibit on the Bowery. Martin Scorsese is finishing work on his film version of Herbert Asbury's The Gangs of New York , which will resurrect Five Points gangs like the Plug Uglies and the Dead Rabbits and make A Clockwork Orange seem like a nice movie about Beethoven. Who knows? Maybe the film's success will turn Chinatown into a Disney theme park featuring drunken riots, interracial sex and a mechanical Abraham Lincoln.

Ted Widmer is director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College. He is the author of Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (Oxford).