Historical Studies of Urban America – serie

Between the early 1900s and the late 1950s, the attitudes of white Californians toward their Asian American neighbors evolved from outright hostility to relative acceptance. Charlotte Brooks examines this transformation through the lens of California's urban housing markets, arguing that the perceived foreignness of Asian Americans, which initially stranded them in segregated areas, eventually facilitated their integration into neighborhoods that rejected other minorities. Against the backdrop of Cold War efforts to win Asian hearts and minds, whites who saw little difference between Asians and Asian Americans increasingly advocated the latter group's access to middle-class life and the residential areas that went with it. But as they transformed Asian Americans into a "model minority," whites purposefully ignored the long backstory of Chinese and Japanese Americans' early and largely failed attempts to participate in public and private housing programs.As Brooks tells this multifaceted story, she draws on a broad range of sources in multiple languages, giving voice to an array of community leaders, journalists, activists, and homeowners - and insightfully conveying the complexity of racialized housing in a multiracial society.

"The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal" examines how postwar thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic considered urban landscapes radically changed by the political and physical realities of sprawl, urban decay, and urban renewal. With a sweep that encompasses New York, London, Toronto, and Berlin, among others, Christopher Klemek traces changing responses to the challenging issues that most affected day-to-day life in the world's cities.

The building and management of public housing is often seen as a signal failure of American public policy, but this is a vastly oversimplified view. In "Purging the Poorest", Lawrence J. Vale offers a new narrative of the seventy-five-year struggle to house the "deserving poor." In the 1930s, two iconic American cities, Atlanta and Chicago, demolished their slums and established some of this country's first public housing. Six decades later, these same cities also led the way in clearing public housing itself. Vale's groundbreaking history of these "twice-cleared" communities provides unprecedented detail about the development, decline, and redevelopment of two of America's most famous housing projects: Chicago's Cabrini-Green and Atlanta's Techwood/Clark Howell Homes. Vale offers the novel concept of "design politics" to show how issues of architecture and urbanism are intimately bound up in thinking about policy. Drawing from extensive archival research and in-depth interviews, Vale recalibrates the larger cultural role of public housing, revalues the contributions of public housing residents, and reconsiders the role of design and designers.

The building and management of public housing is often seen as a signal failure of American public policy, but this is a vastly oversimplified view. In "Purging the Poorest", Lawrence J. Vale offers a new narrative of the seventy-five-year struggle to house the "deserving poor." In the 1930s, two iconic American cities, Atlanta and Chicago, demolished their slums and established some of this country's first public housing. Six decades later, these same cities also led the way in clearing public housing itself. Vale's ground breaking history of these "twice-cleared" communities provides unprecedented detail about the development, decline, and redevelopment of two of America's most famous housing projects: Chicago's Cabrini-Green and Atlanta's Techwood/Clark Howell Homes. Vale offers the novel concept of "design politics" to show how issues of architecture and urbanism are intimately bound up in thinking about policy. Drawing from extensive archival research and in-depth interviews, Vale recalibrates the larger cultural role of public housing, revalues the contributions of public housing residents, and reconsiders the role of design and designers.

Before Franklin Roosevelt declared December 7 to be a "date which will live in infamy"; before American soldiers landed on D-day; before the B-17s, B-24s, and B-29s roared over Europe and Asia, there was Willow Run. Located twenty-five miles west of Detroit, the bomber plant at Willow Run and the community that grew up around it attracted tens of thousands of workers from across the United States during World War II. Together, they helped build the nation's "arsenal of democracy," but Willow Run also became the site of repeated political conflicts over how to build suburbia while mobilizing for total war. In "Planning the Home Front", Sarah Jo Peterson offers readers a portrait of the American people - industrialists, labor leaders, federal officials, municipal leaders, social reformers, and industrial workers and their families - that lays bare the foundations of community, the high costs of racism, and the tangled process of negotiation between New Deal visionaries and wartime planners.By tying the history of suburbanization to that of the home front, Peterson uncovers how the United States planned and built industrial regions in the pursuit of war, setting the stage for the suburban explosion that would change the American landscape when the war was won.

"Building the South Side" explores the struggle for influence that dominated the planning and development of Chicago's South Side during the Progressive Era. Robin F. Bachin examines the early days of the University of Chicago, Chicago's public parks, Comiskey Park, and the Black Belt to consider how community leaders looked to the physical design of the city to shape its culture and promote civic interaction.Bachin highlights how the creation of a local terrain of civic culture was a contested process, with the battle for cultural authority transforming urban politics and blurring the line between private and public space. In the process, universities, parks and playgrounds, and commercial entertainment districts emerged as alternative arenas of civic engagement.

"Building the South Side" explores the struggle for influence that dominated the planning and development of Chicago's South Side during the Progressive Era. Robin F. Bachin examines the early days of the University of Chicago, Chicago's public parks, Comiskey Park, and the Black Belt to consider how community leaders looked to the physical design of the city to shape its culture and promote civic interaction.Bachin highlights how the creation of a local terrain of civic culture was a contested process, with the battle for cultural authority transforming urban politics and blurring the line between private and public space. In the process, universities, parks and playgrounds, and commercial entertainment districts emerged as alternative arenas of civic engagement.

Before skyscrapers and streetlights glowed at all hours, American cities fell into inky blackness with each setting of the sun. But over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new technologies began to light up streets, sidewalks, buildings, and public spaces. Peter C. Baldwin's evocative book depicts the changing experience of the urban night over this period, visiting a host of actors - scavengers, newsboys, and mashers alike - in the nocturnal city. Baldwin examines work, crime, transportation, and leisure as he moves through the gaslight era, exploring the spread of modern police forces and the emergence of late-night entertainment, to the era of electricity, when social campaigns sought to remove women and children from public areas at night. While many people celebrated the transition from darkness to light as the arrival of twenty-four hours of daytime, Baldwin shows that certain social patterns remained, including the danger of street crime and the skewed gender profile of night work.Sweeping us from concert halls and brothels to streetcars and industrial forges, "In the Watches of the Night" is an illuminating study of a vital era in American urban history.

In 1997, after General Motors shuttered a massive complex of factories in the gritty industrial city of Flint, Michigan, workers placed signs around the empty facility reading, "Demolition Means Progress," suggesting that the struggling city could not move forward to greatness until the old plants met the wrecking ball. Much more than a trite slogan, the phrase encapsulates the operating ethos of the nation's metropolitan leadership from at least the 1930s to the present. Throughout, the leaders of Flint and other municipalities repeatedly tried to revitalize their communities by demolishing outdated structures and institutions and overseeing numerous urban renewal campaigns - many of which yielded only a more impoverished and more divided metropolis. After decades of these efforts, the dawn of the twenty-first century found Flint one of the most racially segregated and economically polarized metropolitan areas in the nation. In one of the most comprehensive works yet written on the history of inequality and metropolitan development in modern America, Andrew R.Highsmith uses the case of Flint to explain how the perennial quest for urban renewal - even more than white flight, corporate abandonment, and other forces - contributed to mass suburbanization, racial and economic division, deindustrialization, and political fragmentation. Challenging much of the conventional wisdom about structural inequality and the roots of the nation's urban crisis, Demolition Means Progress shows in vivid detail how public policies and programs designed to revitalize the Flint area ultimately led to the hardening of social divisions.

For many years, the interrelated histories of prostitution and cities have perked the ears of urban scholars, but until now the history of urban sex work has dealt only in passing with questions of race. In "I've Got to Make My Livin", Cynthia Blair explores African American women's sex work in Chicago during the decades of some of the city's most explosive growth, expanding not just our view of prostitution, but also of black women's labor, the Great Migration, black and white reform movements, and the emergence of modern sexuality. Focusing on the notorious sex districts of the city's south side, Blair paints a complex portrait of black prostitutes as conscious actors and historical agents, prostitution, she argues here, was an arena of exploitation and abuse, as well as a means of resisting middle-class sexual and economic norms. Blair ultimately illustrates just how powerful these norms were, offering stories about the struggles that emerged among black and white urbanites in response to black women's increasing visibility in the city's sex economy.Through these powerful narratives, "I've Got to Make My Livin" reveals the intersecting racial struggles and sexual anxieties that underpinned the celebration of Chicago as the quintessentially modern twentieth-century city.

Between the early 1900s and the late 1950s, the attitudes of white Californians toward their Asian American neighbors evolved from outright hostility to relative acceptance. Charlotte Brooks examines this transformation through the lens of California's urban housing markets, arguing that the perceived foreignness of Asian Americans, which initially stranded them in segregated areas, eventually facilitated their integration into neighborhoods that rejected other minorities. Against the backdrop of cold war efforts to win Asian hearts and minds, whites who saw little difference between Asians and Asian Americans increasingly advocated the latter group's access to middle-class life and the residential areas that went with it. But as they transformed Asian Americans into a 'model minority', whites purposefully ignored the long backstory of Chinese and Japanese Americans' early and largely failed attempts to participate in public and private housing programs.As Brooks tells this multifaceted story, she draws on a broad range of sources in multiple languages, giving voice to an array of community leaders, journalists, activists, and homeowners - and insightfully conveying the complexity of racialized housing in a multiracial society.

Many people understand urban renewal projects and the power of eminent domain as two of the most widely despised, and even racist, tools for reshaping American cities in the postwar period. In A World More Concrete, N. D. B. Connolly unearths a far more complex story. Connolly scrutinizes nearly eighty years of history and reveals how real estate and land development in South Florida are expressions of political culture, racial power, and metropolitan transformation. He uses a materialist approach to offer a long view of urban redevelopment and the color line, following much of the money that made Jim Crow segregation a profitable and durable social process in cities throughout the twentieth century. Connolly argues that black and white landlords, entrepreneurs, and even liberal community leaders helped create a political culture that, through rents, took advantage of the poor to generate remarkable wealth and advance property rights at the expense of more inclusive visions of equality. For elite blacks, as for their white allies, uses of eminent domain helped to harden class and color lines.Yet confiscating certain kinds of real estate also promised to help improve housing conditions, to undermine the neighborhood influence of powerful slumlords, and to open new opportunities for suburban life for black Floridians. Concerned more with winners and losers than with heroes and villains, A World More Concrete offers a sober assessment of money and power in Jim Crow America. It shows how negotiations between powerful real estate interests on both sides of the color line gave racial segregation a remarkable capacity to evolve, revealing property owners' power to reshape American cities in ways that can still be seen and felt today.

For decades, the city of San Francisco has been nearly synonymous with the word "liberal," known for its diversity and acceptance, environmental activism, and thriving art scene. But this has not always been the case. Liberalism in San Francisco in the years right after World War II was mostly confined to notions of state welfare and business regulation. It wasn't until the 1950s and 1960s, when new peoples and cultures poured into the city, that San Francisco produced a new liberal politics. Christopher Lowen Agee details this fascinating transition in The Streets of San Francisco, focusing in particular on the crucial role the police played during this cultural and political shift. He partly attributes the creation and survival of cosmopolitan liberalism to the police's new authority to use their discretion when interacting with African American gang leaders, gay and lesbian bar owners, Haight-Ashbury hippies, artists who created sexually explicit works, Chinese American entrepreneurs, and a host of other postwar San Franciscans. In thus emboldening rank-and-file police officers, Agee shows, the city created partners in democratic governance.The success of this model in San Francisco resulted in the rise of cosmopolitan liberal coalitions throughout the country. Today, liberal cities across America ground themselves in similar understandings of democracy through an emphasis on both broad diversity and strong policing.

Glossy magazines write about them, celebrities give their names to them, and you'd better believe there's an app (or ten) committed to finding you the right one. They are New York City restaurants and food shops. And their journey to international notoriety is a captivating one. The now-booming food capital was once a small seaport city, home to a mere six municipal food markets that were stocked by farmers, fishermen, and hunters who lived in the area. By 1890, however, the city's population had grown to more than a million, and residents could dine in thousands of restaurants with a greater abundance and variety of options than any other place in the United States. Historians, sociologists, and foodies alike will devour the story of the origins of New York City's food industry in Urban Appetites. Cindy R. Lobel focuses on the rise of New York as both a metropolis and a food capital, opening a new window onto the intersection of the cultural, social, political, and economic transformations of the nineteenth century.She offers wonderfully detailed accounts of public markets and private food shops; basement restaurants and immigrant diners serving favorites from the old country; cake and coffee shops; and high-end, French-inspired eating houses made for being seen in society as much as for dining. But as the food and the population became increasingly cosmopolitan, corruption, contamination, and undeniably inequitable conditions escalated. Urban Appetites serves up a complete picture of the evolution of the city, its politics, and its foodways.

The term "community organizer" was deployed repeatedly against Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign as a way to paint him as an inexperienced politician unfit for the presidency. The implication was that the job of a community organizer wasn't a serious one, and that it certainly wasn't on the list of credentials needed for a presidential resume. In reality, community organizers have played key roles in the political lives of American cities for decades, perhaps never more so than during the 1970s in Chicago, where African Americans laid the groundwork for further empowerment as they organized against segregation, discrimination, and lack of equal access to schools, housing, and jobs. In Crucibles of Black Empowerment, Jeffrey Helgeson recounts the rise of African American political power and activism from the 1930s onward, revealing how it was achieved through community building.His book tells stories of the housewives who organized their neighbors, building tradesmen who used connections with federal officials to create opportunities in a deeply discriminatory sector, and the social workers, personnel managers, and journalists who carved out positions in the white-collar workforce. Looking closely at black liberal politics at the neighborhood level in Chicago, Helgeson explains how black Chicagoans built the networks that eventually would overthrow the city's seemingly invincible political machine.

By the end of the 1920s, just ten years after the Jones Act first made them full-fledged Americans, more than 45,000 native Puerto Ricans had left their homes and entered the United States, citizenship papers in hand, forming one of New York City's most complex and distinctive migrant communities. In Puerto Rican Citizen, Lorrin Thomas for the first time unravels the many tensions - historical, racial, political, and economic - that defined the experience of this group of American citizens before and after World War II. Building its incisive narrative from a wide range of archival sources, interviews, and first-person accounts of Puerto Rican life in New York, this book illuminates the rich history of a group that is still largely invisible to many scholars and transforms the way we understand this community's integral role in shaping our sense of citizenship in twentieth-century America.

Brown in the Windy City is the first history to examine the migration and settlement of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in postwar Chicago. Lilia Fernandez reveals how the two populations arrived in Chicago in the midst of tremendous social and economic change and, in spite of declining industrial employment and massive urban renewal projects, managed to carve out a geographic and racial place in one of America's great cities. Through their experiences in the city's central neighborhoods over the course of these three decades, Fernandez demonstrates how Mexicans and Puerto Ricans collectively articulated a distinct racial position in Chicago, one that was flexible and fluid, neither black nor white.

Like other industrial cities in the postwar period, Chicago underwent the dramatic population shifts that radically changed the complexion of the urban north. As African American populations grew and white communities declined throughout the 1960s and '70s, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans migrated to the city, adding a complex layer to local racial dynamics. "Brown in the Windy City" is the first history to examine the migration and settlement of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in the postwar era. Here, Lilia Fernandez reveals how the two populations arrived in Chicago in the midst of tremendous social and economic change and, in the midst of declining industrial employment and massive urban renewal projects, managed to carve out a geographic and racial place in one of America's great cities. Over the course of these three decades, through their experiences in the city's central neighborhoods, Fernandez demonstrates how Mexicans and Puerto Ricans collectively articulated a distinct racial position in Chicago, one that was flexible and fluid, neither black nor white.

In this provocative and accessible urban history, Lila Corwin Berman considers the role that Detroit's Jews played in the city's well-known narrative of migration and decline. Taking its cue from social critics and historians who have long looked toward Detroit to understand twentieth-century urban transformations, Metropolitan Jews tells the story of Jews leaving the city while retaining a deep connection to it. Berman argues convincingly that though most Jews moved to the suburbs, urban abandonment, disinvestment, and an embrace of conservatism did not invariably accompany their moves. Instead, the Jewish postwar migration was marked by an enduring commitment to a newly fashioned urbanism with a vision of self, community, and society that persisted well beyond city limits. Complex and subtle, Metropolitan Jews pushes urban scholarship beyond the tenacious black/white, urban/suburban dichotomy. It demands a more nuanced understanding of the process and politics of suburbanization and will reframe how we think about the American urban experiment and modern Jewish history.

It was the biggest funeral Chicago had seen since Lincoln's. On May 26, 1889, four thousand mourners proceeded down Michigan Avenue, followed by a crowd forty thousand strong, in a howl of protest at what commentators called one of the ghastliest and most curious crimes in civilized history. The dead man, Dr P H Cronin, was a respected Irish physician, but his brutal murder uncovered a web of intrigue, secrecy, and corruption that stretched across the United States and far beyond. Blood Runs Green tells the story of Cronin's murder from the police investigation to the trial. It is a story of hotheaded journalists in pursuit of sensational crimes, of a bungling police force riddled with informers and spies, and of a secret revolutionary society determined to free Ireland yet succeeding only in tearing itself apart. It is also the story of a booming immigrant population clamoring for power at a time of unprecedented change. From backrooms to courtrooms, historian Gillian O'Brien deftly navigates the complexities of Irish Chicago, bringing to life a rich cast of characters and tracing the spectacular rise and fall of the secret Irish American society Clan na Gael.She draws on real-life accounts and sources from the United States, Ireland, and Britain to cast new light on Clan na Gael and reveal how Irish republicanism swept across the United States. Destined to be a true crime classic, Blood Runs Green is an enthralling tale of a murder that captivated the world and rever-berated through society long after the coffin closed.

In "Colored Property", David M. P. Freund shows how federal intervention spurred a dramatic shift in the language and logic of racial integration in residential neighborhoods after World War II - away from invocations of a mythical racial hierarchy and toward talk of markets, property, and citizenship. Freund traces the emergence of a powerful public-private alliance that facilitated postwar suburban growth across the nation with federal programs that significantly favored whites. Then, showing how this national story played out in metropolitan Detroit, he demonstrates how whites learned to view discrimination not as an act of racism but as a legitimate response to the needs of the market. Illuminating government's powerful yet still-hidden role in the segregation of U.S. cities, "Colored Property" presents a dramatic new vision of metropolitan growth, segregation, and white identity in modern America.

In "Colored Property", David M. P. Freund shows how federal intervention spurred a dramatic shift in the language and logic of racial integration in residential neighborhoods after World War II - away from invocations of a mythical racial hierarchy and toward talk of markets, property, and citizenship. Freund traces the emergence of a powerful public-private alliance that facilitated postwar suburban growth across the nation with federal programs that significantly favored whites. Then, showing how this national story played out in metropolitan Detroit, he demonstrates how whites learned to view discrimination not as an act of racism but as a legitimate response to the needs of the market. Illuminating government's powerful yet still-hidden role in the segregation of U.S. cities, "Colored Property" presents a dramatic new vision of metropolitan growth, segregation, and white identity in modern America.

Before skyscrapers and streetlights glowed at all hours, American cities fell into inky blackness with each setting of the sun. But over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new technologies began to light up streets, sidewalks, buildings, and public spaces. Peter C. Baldwin's evocative book depicts the changing experience of the urban night over this period, visiting a host of actors - scavengers, newsboys, and mashers alike - in the nocturnal city. Baldwin examines work, crime, transportation, and leisure as he moves through the gaslight era, exploring the spread of modern police forces and the emergence of late-night entertainment, to the era of electricity, when social campaigns sought to remove women and children from public areas at night. While many people celebrated the transition from darkness to light as the arrival of twenty-four hours of daytime, Baldwin shows that certain social patterns remained, including the danger of street crime and the skewed gender profile of night work.Sweeping us from concert halls and brothels to streetcars and industrial forges, In the Watches of the Night is an illuminating study of a vital era in American urban history.

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.

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.

Is there anything more American than the ideal of homeownership? In this groundbreaking work of transnational history, Nancy H. Kwak reveals how the concept of homeownership became one of America's major exports and defining characteristics around the world. In the aftermath of World War II, American advisers urged countries to pursue greater access to homeownership, arguing it would give families a literal stake in their nations, jumpstart a productive home-building industry, fuel economic growth, and raise the standard of living in their countries, helping to ward off the specter of communism. A World of Homeowners charts the emergence of democratic homeownership in the postwar landscape and booming economy; its evolution as a tool of foreign policy and a vehicle for international investment in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s; and the growth of lower-income homeownership programs in the United States from the 1960s to today. Kwak unravels all these threads, detailing the complex stories and policy struggles that emerged from a particularly American vision for global democracy and capitalism.Ultimately, she argues, the question of who should own homes where-and how-is intertwined with the most difficult questions about economy, government, and society.

Despite the pundits who have written its epitaph and the latter-day refugees who have fled its confines for the half-acre suburban estate, the city neighborhood has endured as an idea central to American culture. In A Nation of Neighborhoods, Benjamin Looker presents us with the city neighborhood as both an endless problem and a possibility. Looker investigates the cultural, social, and political complexities of the idea of "neighborhood" in postwar America and how Americans grappled with vast changes in their urban spaces from World War II to the Reagan era. In the face of urban decline, competing visions of the city neighborhood's significance and purpose became proxies for broader debates over the meaning and limits of American democracy. By studying the way these contests unfolded across a startling variety of genres-Broadway shows, radio plays, urban ethnographies, real estate documents, and even children's programming-Looker shows that the neighborhood ideal has functioned as a central symbolic site for advancing and debating theories about American national identity and democratic practice.

When we talk about the Civil War, we often describe it in terms of battles that took place in small towns or in the countryside: Antietam, Gettysburg, Bull Run, and, most tellingly, the Battle of the Wilderness. One reason this picture has persisted is that few urban historians have studied the war, even though cities hosted, enabled, and shaped Southern society as much as they did in the North. Confederate Cities, edited by Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers, shifts the focus from the agrarian economy that undergirded the South to the cities that served as its political and administrative hubs. The contributors use the lens of the city to examine now-familiar Civil War-era themes, including the scope of the war, secession, gender, emancipation, and war's destruction. This more integrative approach dramatically revises our understanding of slavery's relationship to capitalist economics and cultural modernity. By enabling a more holistic reading of the South, the book speaks to contemporary Civil War scholars and students alike-not least in providing fresh perspectives on a well-studied war.

In "Selling the Race", Adam Green tells the story of how black Chicagoans were at the center of a national movement in the 1940s and '50s, a time when African Americans across the country first started to see themselves as part of a single culture. Along the way, he offers fascinating reinterpretations of such events as the 1940 American Negro Exposition, the rise of black music and the culture industry that emerged around it, the development of the Associated Negro Press and the founding of Johnson Publishing, and the outcry over the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till. By presenting African Americans as agents, rather than casualties, of modernity, Green ultimately re envisions urban existence in a way that will resonate with anyone interested in race, culture, or the life of cities.