Margaret Garb – författare

In the spring of 1915, Chicagoans elected the city's first black alderman, Oscar DePriest. In a city where African Americans made up less than five percent of the voting population, and in a nation that dismissed and denied black political participation, DePriest's victory was astonishing. It did not, however, surprise the unruly group of black activists who had been working for several decades to win representation on the city council. Freedom's Ballot is the history of three generations of African American activists - the ministers, professionals, labor leaders, clubwomen, and entrepreneurs - who transformed twentieth-century urban politics. This is a complex and important story of how black political power was institutionalized in Chicago in the half-century following the Civil War. Margaret Garb explores the social and political fabric of Chicago, revealing how the physical makeup of the city was shaped by both political corruption and racial empowerment - in ways that can still be seen and felt today.

The recent housing market crash shattered Americans' boundless faith in home ownership. "City of American Dreams" is an innovative history of our national obsession with real estate. Margaret Garb reveals that the aspiration for single-family home ownership was forged in impoverished immigrant neighborhoods in industrializing cities. It was late nineteenth-century health and housing reformers who, along with the talented marketing of real estate developers, transformed an immigrant ideal into a mark of the middle class and the American Dream. After 1900, the pursuit of home ownership was inextricably linked to growing racial segregation in northern cities, ultimately leading to the emergence of urban landscapes sharply divided by race and class. Garb demonstrates that the very essence of the American Dream - the single-family house set on a tidy yard - was neither natural nor an inevitable expression of American identity. Rather, it resulted from decades of struggle among homeowners, builders, developers, reformers, and policy makers.