Series: Historical Studies of Urban America

How suburbanisation was a crucial catalyst for reforms in the Catholic Church. The 1960s in America were a time of revolt against the stifling conformism embodied in the sprawling, uniform suburbs of the 1950s. Typically, the reforms of the Catholic Church's Second Vatican Council, which aimed to make the Church more modern and accessible, are seen as one result of...

How reforms to girlhood education in the Progressive Era cemented inequalities of gender, race, and class in urban school systems. In Home Work, historian Ruby Oram tells the story of how middle-class, white women reformers lobbied the state to implement various public education reforms to shape the lives of girls and women in industrial cities between 1870 and 1930. Women...

Traces the birth, plunder, and scavenging of Rosemont, a Black middle-class neighbourhood in Baltimore. In the mid-1950s, Baltimore's Rosemont neighbourhood was alive and vibrant with smart rowhouses, a sprawling park, corner grocery stores, and doctor's offices. By 1957, a proposed expressway threatened to gut this Black, middle-class community from stem to stern. That highway was never built—but it didn't matter:...

A sweeping history of New York that chronicles the construction of one of the world's great cities. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, New York City experienced explosive growth as nearly a million buildings, dozens of bridges and tunnels, hundreds of miles of subway lines, and thousands of miles of streets were erected to meet the needs of an ever-swelling...

City of Dignity illuminates how liberal Protestants quietly, yet indelibly, shaped the progressive ethics of postwar Los Angeles. Contemporary Los Angeles is commonly seen as an American bulwark of progressive secular politics, a place that values immigration, equity, diversity, and human rights. But what accounts for the city’s embrace of such staunchly liberal values, which are more hotly contested in...

Highlights how low-wage residents have struggled to live and work in a place usually thought of as affluent: suburbia. There is a familiar narrative about American suburbs: after 1945, white residents left cities for leafy, affluent subdivisions and the prosperity they seemed to embody. In Levittown’s Shadow tells us there’s more to this story, offering an eye-opening account of diverse,...

A new edition of a classic work revealing the little-known history of African Americans in New York City before Emancipation. Popular understanding of the history of slavery in America has a crucial gap: It almost entirely ignores its extensive reach in the North. But the cities of the North were built by—and became the home of—tens of thousands of enslaved...

First published in 1983 and praised by the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Thomas Sugrue, Arnold R. Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto is the rare book that has only become more piercingly prescient over the years. Hirsch’s classic and groundbreaking work of urban history is a revelatory look at Chicago in the decades after the Great Depression, a period when...

A potent re-examination of America’s history of public disinvestment in mass transit. Many a scholar and policy analyst has lamented American dependence on cars and the corresponding lack of federal investment in public transportation throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century. But as Nicholas Dagen Bloom shows in The Great American Transit Disaster, our transit networks are so bad...

A potent re-examination of America's history of public disinvestment in mass transit. Many a scholar and policy analyst has lamented American dependence on cars and the corresponding lack of federal investment in public transportation throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century. But as Nicholas Dagen Bloom shows in The Great American Transit Disaster, our transit networks are so bad...

A groundbreaking look at the transformation of SoHo. American cities entered a new phase when, beginning in the 1950s, artists and developers looked upon a decaying industrial zone in Lower Manhattan and saw, not blight, but opportunity: cheap rents, lax regulation, and wide open spaces. Thus, SoHo was born. From 1960 to 1980, residents transformed the industrial neighbourhood into an...

Interrogates the connections between a city's physical landscape and the poverty and social problems that are often concentrated at its literal lowest points. In Urban Lowlands, Steven T. Moga looks closely at the Harlem Flats in New York City, Black Bottom in Nashville, Swede Hollow in Saint Paul, and the Flats in Los Angeles to interrogate the connections between a...

How a form of multifamily housing with idealistic roots became a ubiquitous model promoted by both public entities and private developers. Eminent historian Joshua Freeman rescues garden apartments—typically low-rise multifamily residences that enclose or are surrounded by landscaped gardens—from their invisibility in the American landscape. He details their outsized influence on housing policy and social policy, as they have helped...

An exploration of how and why American city governments delegated the responsibility for solving urban inequality to the nonprofit sector. American cities are rife with nonprofit organisations that provide services ranging from arts to parks, and health to housing. These organisations have become so ubiquitous, it can be difficult to envision a time when they were fewer, smaller, and more...