Talk:A Hashish-House in New York (Kane 1883)
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The article used
The article was read whole on 20 and 21 October 2026 in the Internet Archive OCR of the bound volume (Harper's New Monthly Magazine, vol. 67, June to November 1883, item harpersnew67various). Every quotation on the page was then checked against the page images of the National Library of Medicine's extract (NLM Unique ID 101732631; Internet Archive item 101732631.nlm.nih.gov). The page range 944–949 rests on the running heads of those images and on the NLM record ("pages 944-949"); the next article in the volume, "Cesar and His Fortunes", begins on p. 950. The issue number 402 comes from the Internet Archive record of the November 1883 number. The volume's contents (p. vi) list the article as "Hashish-House in New York, A, H. H. Kane, M.D., 944".
Authorship
The article is unsigned; the caption title and subtitle stand alone on p. 944. The attribution to Kane comes from the half-yearly contents of the volume, and the NLM catalogues its extract under "Kane, H. H. (Harry Hubbell), 1854-". Abel (1980) calls the article anonymous and its author "generally believed" to be Kane; the volume's own contents name him. No death date is given for Kane: none of the sources read states one.
The "six hundred"
The guide's figure of "at least six hundred in this city alone" answers the narrator's question about "ladies of good social standing", and the word used is the feminine habituées (italic in print, p. 948). It is a figure for women, as the guide gives it. Abel (1980) reports it as the number of the house's habitués in New York in general. The article states the guide's figure in his words, with the question it answers.
Where the house was
The article gives no address. The two men ride a Broadway car up-town, leave it at Forty-second Street and walk "toward the North River" (p. 944), so the house lay west of Broadway at some distance not stated. Abel (1980) places it "near Forty-second Street and Broadway"; Campos (2023) calls it a house "in upper Manhattan". The article keeps to the route as the narrator describes it.
"Kept by a Greek"
"Greek" is the guide's word (p. 945) and is kept as his. The article names no Syrian, Lebanese or Arab person and places no importer or supplier. Gieringer's note that "Greek" was "a name often used for Syrians" (revised paper, January 2024, p. 10, note 32) is his gloss and is attributed to him. Whether that note is in the 1999 journal text of his paper was not checked; the page cites the revised version that was read.
Kane's terms
Gunjeh, Majoon, El Mogen and "Nepaul" are kept in Kane's spellings and quoted. The article does not equate gunjeh with ganja or the "Nepaul resin" with charas in its own voice: Kane gives his own glosses ("the dried tops and leaves of the hemp plant"; "the finest Nepaul resin of the hemp") and those are what the page reports. Majoon is linked to the confection page because Kane himself names it as the Indian Majoon. The two lists of the lozenges' ingredients (pp. 945 and 946–947) differ: the second adds sugar, flour and opium. Both are quoted. The servants Kane calls "colored" are referred to in his word, in quotation, only.
Secondary sources
- Abel 1980, chapter "Hashish in America" (pp. 171–185), was read in the reproduction of the book's text on ukcia.org; page pins within the chapter were not available there, so the chapter range is cited.
- Gieringer was read in the revised PDF on the California NORML site (title page: revised January 2024). Page numbers are those printed on the PDF pages.
- Campos, "06. Jack Herer and the Anatomy of a Conspiracy Theory", History on Drugs, 27 September 2023, is a newsletter by a professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. It is used only for his own reading, attributed. His two related posts (25 and 29 September 2023) were not used: the first is mostly behind a paywall and the second does not discuss the article.
- Herer's sentence is quoted as Campos quotes it. An Internet Archive copy of The Emperor Wears No Clothes (an e-book of an edition not identified) has the fuller wording "By 1883, similar hashish smoking parlors were legally open in every major American city, including New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, and so on", followed by the claim of 500 parlours attributed to The Police Gazette.
- The Oxford English Dictionary is reported to cite the article for joint in the sense of an opium den (the word is italic in print on p. 944). This was not checked against the dictionary and is not on the page.