Up All Night: A World History of Nightlife

From Georgian London’s gaudy pleasure gardens to the glamor of Studio 54 to the birth of techno in post-industrial Detroit, a brilliantly researched history charting four centuries of nightlife

There is a specific energy to it. Cafes and shops close their shutters. Darkness descends. “The air begins to tingle,” wrote John Dos Passos of twenties New York. “It’s tonight if you drink enough, talk enough, walk far enough, that the train of magical events will begin.”

Nightlife, defined by party historian Imogen Willetts as “a commercial and secular environment designed to offer a variety of pleasures at night,” has been buzzing for more than 350 years, and Up All Night traces its history back to a surprising starting point: seventeenth-century Japan, in a remote marshland outside the shogun’s de facto capital. Over the centuries, nightlife cemented its place at the frontier of popular culture and self-expression, making cities famous, nurturing iconic countercultures, and growing into a multibillion-dollar industry. Yet its sweeping history has been left largely untold.

Up All Night is the story of the goodnights and the great ones. How did jazz develop in the dancehalls of turn-of-the-century New Orleans? What magic created the hopeful, messy, paparazzi heyday of early aughts LA? And what, in our increasingly online lives, are we missing when we pass up the chance of a big night out? Imogen Willetts pieces together the tantalizing ephemera and foggy reminiscences to take us behind the velvet rope of history’s hottest nightspots and show how they changed the world around us.