In the Week in Review section of today’s New York Times, Kevin Baker, the author of Paradise, a novel set in the nineteenth-century slums of lower Manhattan, has an amusing article on the history of trash in New York City. Did you know that during the Civil War draft riots, striking sanitation workers smashed street-cleaning machines, shouting “Death to the labor-saving devices!”? Me either.

It’s nice that Martin Scorsese’s movie Gangs of New York has focused attention on the horrors of life in New York’s nineteenth-century slums and inspired the mainstream media to revisit that history -- but the renewal of interest is at least a decade too late.

In 1990, Herbert Asbury’s 1928 book The Gangs of New York was reissued; Luc Sante’s Low Life, which cover a lot of the same ground, was published in 1991. It was obvious to anyone who read those books at the time that drug-drenched, hopeless slums were not a new phenomenon in America, that the crack-trade Uzi murders that regularly led the news back then were exactly analogous to the crimes of lower Manhattan’s past, crimes that took place in slums full of shivs and brickbats and opium and “blind pig” saloons.

Most of the members of lower Manhattan’s criminal underclass were white. This is important. The Bell Curve, notoriously, was published in 1994, but what that book asserted outright had already been hinted at, in code words, by far too many “thoughtful” people in the 1980s and early 1990s: namely, the notion that blacks and Hispanics were simply unsuited, possibly because of their genes, to full participation in civilized society.

The Gangs of New York and Low Life sold tens of thousands of copies -- they were successful books by the standards of the publishing industry -- but the mainstream media rarely if ever alluded to the Five Points when discussing the South Bronx or Compton. So most Americans never grasped the obvious: If many of the slum-dwelling thugs of America’s past were of Irish and English and German descent -- members of ethnic groups now entirely assimilated into our society -- then why were so many people suggesting that contemporary ghetto dwellers and their descendants might be marginalized forever?

The Rodney King riots took place in 1992. We were regularly told that these riots were the worst American riots of the century; the mainstream media, however, never told us why it was necessary to add that qualification “of the century” -- we were never told about the Civil War draft riots, which, just like the L.A. riots, began as a political response to an apparent racial outrage and descended into anarchy and race murder, but with the races reversed.

White rioters in 1863 hung blacks from lampposts and burned a black orphanage. Anyone who thought that the L.A. riots demonstrated a unique black/Hispanic depravity should have learned about this strikingly analogous white riot.

Our press was lazy, so most people never did.

I see heartening signs of a fairly substantial improvement in America’s racial attitudes over the past decade or so. I hope it’s a permanent change -- though I worry that the crummy economy of the Bush years will eventually lead some white Americans to start looking for scapegoats again. If we’re finally coming together, maybe it’s irrelevant now that we missed an opportunity a decade ago to learn something from history. The mainstream media failed to give us some perspective when we could have used it -- and that’s a major failure.