Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940
By Chad Heap
University of Chicago Press £24, 432 pages
FT Bookshop price: £19.20

The desire to see how the other half lives is the central theme of Chad Heap’s Slumming. Concentrating on New York and Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th century, Heap tries to explain the desire of the white middle and upper class to travel to down-at-heel and racially different parts of their cities, and how their doing so affected society.