Up All Night: A World History 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, as defined by party historian Imogen Willetts, is “a commercial and secular environment designed to offer a variety of pleasures at night.” Up All Night traces its history back to a surprising starting point: seventeenth-century Japan, in a remote party destination built outside the shogun’s capital. Nightlife has been at the frontier of popular culture and self-expression ever since, 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 good nights and the great ones. How did jazz develop in the dancehalls of turn-of-the-century New Orleans? What was it like to party in 1920s Paris? Why were we so obsessed with the messy chaos of the early aughts LA scene? And what, in our increasingly online lives, are we missing when we pass up the chance of a big night out? Join party historian Imogen Willetts for a guided tour behind the velvet rope of history’s wildest nights out.