Bøger i Historical Studies of Urban America serien

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. The author examines this transformation through the lens of California's urban housing markets.

When we think of segregation, what often comes to mind is apartheid South Africa, or the American South in the age of Jim Crow - two societies fundamentally premised on the concept of the separation of the races. In this title, the author shows us that segregation is everywhere, deforming cities and societies worldwide.

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, technologies began to light up streets, buildings, and public spaces. This book depicts the changing experience of the urban night over this period.

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. This book offers interpretations of such events as the 1940 American Negro Exposition.

"Steven Moga offers an unprecedented and multidisciplinary tour of urban lowlands, bringing a fresh perspective to the history of urban development in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Looking closely at the Harlem Flats in New York City; Black Bottom in Nashville; Swede Hollow in St. Paul; and The Flats in Los Angeles, Moga compares and contrasts patterns of land use, reactions to disease and public health, the treatment of waste, and social discrimination against immigrants, ethnic groups, and African Americans. He creates an alternative interpretive framework for studying poverty and the urban environment, with implications for the contemporary American city"--

"The malign influence of Chicago police commander Jon Burge cannot be overestimated. While it can scarcely be said that Burge was the only violently racist Chicago cop, he has become the very emblem of police brutality and unequal treatment for nonwhite people, and his actions have had widespread reverberations. During his many years on the force, Burge used barbaric methods, including electric shock, beatings, burnings, and mock executions, to coerce confessions and information from the guilty and the innocent alike. After exposure of his actions in 1989, Burge became a totem for police racism in Chicago and nationwide. Andrew S. Baer here shows that Burge arose from a particular milieu, and his actions fueled resistance that might not otherwise have cohered so powerfully"--

"Strictly and widely illegal, the most common manifestations of urban gambling were once "the numbers game" and "policy," in which people would place daily bets on random numbers, through community institutions, such as newsstands and barbershops. Gambling became one of the largest economic activities and sources of employment in some nonwhite neighborhoods-and therefore it drew intense police interest. Some of the most corrupt and blatantly discriminatory police actions centered on gambling and its practitioners. The state's interest doomed urban gambling, as many states coopted the market with their own hugely lucrative lotteries. A game that first flourished in poor and nonwhite urban communities has become America's game"--

New Orleans in the 1920s and 1930s was a deadly place. In 1925, the city's homicide rate was six times that of New York City and twelve times that of Boston. Jeffrey S. Adler has explored every homicide recorded in New Orleans between 1925 and 1940--over two thousand in all--scouring police and autopsy reports, old interviews, and crumbling newspapers. More than simply quantifying these cases, Adler places them in larger contexts--legal, political, cultural, and demographic--and emerges with a tale of racism, urban violence, and vicious policing that has startling relevance for today.Murder in New Orleans shows that whites were convicted of homicide at far higher rates than blacks leading up to the mid-1920s. But by the end of the following decade, this pattern had reversed completely, despite an overall drop in municipal crime rates. The injustice of this sharp rise in arrests was compounded by increasingly brutal treatment of black subjects by the New Orleans police department. Adler explores other counterintuitive trends in violence, particularly how murder soared during the flush times of the Roaring Twenties, how it plummeted during the Great Depression, and how the vicious response to African American crime occurred even as such violence plunged in frequency--revealing that the city's cycle of racial policing and punishment was connected less to actual patterns of wrongdoing than to the national enshrinement of Jim Crow. Rather than some hyperviolent outlier, this Louisiana city was a harbinger of the endemic racism at the center of today's criminal justice state. Murder in New Orleans lays bare how decades-old crimes, and the racially motivated cruelty of the official response, have baleful resonance in the age of Black Lives Matter.

When Juliette Kinzie first visited Chicago in 1831, it was anything but a city. An outpost in the shadow of Fort Dearborn, it had no streets, no sidewalks, no schools, no river-spanning bridges. And with two hundred disconnected residents, it lacked any sense of community. In the decades that followed, not only did Juliette witness the city's transition from Indian country to industrial center, but she was instrumental in its development. Juliette is one of Chicago's forgotten founders. Early Chicago is often presented as "a man's city," but women like Juliette worked to create an urban and urbane world, often within their own parlors. With The World of Juliette Kinzie, we finally get to experience the rise of Chicago from the view of one of its most important founding mothers. Ann Durkin Keating, one of the foremost experts on nineteenth-century Chicago, offers a moving portrait of a trailblazing and complicated woman. Keating takes us to the corner of Cass and Michigan (now Wabash and Hubbard), Juliette's home base. Through Juliette's eyes, our understanding of early Chicago expands from a city of boosters and speculators to include the world that women created in and between households. We see the development of Chicago society, first inspired by cities in the East and later coming into its own midwestern ways. We also see the city become a community, as it developed its intertwined religious, social, educational, and cultural institutions. Keating draws on a wealth of sources, including hundreds of Juliette's personal letters, allowing Juliette to tell much of her story in her own words. Juliette's death in 1870, just a year before the infamous fire, seemed almost prescient. She left her beloved Chicago right before the physical city as she knew it vanished in flames. But now her history lives on. The World of Juliette Kinzie offers a new perspective on Chicago's past and is a fitting tribute to one of the first women historians in the United States.

From the 1890s through World War II, the greatest hopes of American progressive reformers lay not in the government, the markets, or other seats of power but in urban school districts and classrooms. The Importance of Being Urban focuses on four western school systems - in Denver, Oakland, Portland, and Seattle - and their efforts to reconfigure public education in the face of rapid industrialization and the perceived perils [GDA1] of the modern city. In an era of accelerated immigration, shifting economic foundations, and widespread municipal shake-ups, reformers argued that the urban school district could provide the broad blend of social, cultural, and educational services needed to prepare students for twentieth-century life. These school districts were a crucial force not only in orchestrating educational change, but in delivering on the promise of democracy. David A. Gamson's book provides eye-opening views of the histories of American education, urban politics, and the Progressive Era.

The history of New York City's urban development often centers on titanic municipal figures like Robert Moses and on prominent inner Manhattan sites like Central Park. New York Recentered boldly shifts the focus to the city's geographic edges--the coastlines and waterways--and to the small-time unelected locals who quietly shaped the modern city. Kara Murphy Schlichting details how the vernacular planning done by small businessmen and real estate operators, performed independently of large scale governmental efforts, refigured marginal locales like Flushing Meadows and the shores of Long Island Sound and the East River in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The result is a synthesis of planning history, environmental history, and urban history that recasts the story of New York as we know it.

In the decades following World War II, a movement of clergy and laity sought to restore liberal Protestantism to the center of American urban life. Chastened by their failure to avert war and the Holocaust, and troubled by missionaries' complicity with colonial regimes, they redirected their energies back home. Renewal explores the rise and fall of this movement, which began as an effort to restore the church's standing but wound up as nothing less than an openhearted crusade to remake our nation's cities. These campaigns reached beyond church walls to build or lend a hand to scores of organizations fighting for welfare, social justice, and community empowerment among the increasingly nonwhite urban working class. Church leaders extended their efforts far beyond traditional evangelicalism, often dovetailing with many of the contemporaneous social currents coursing through the nation, including black freedom movements and the War on Poverty. Renewal illuminates the overlooked story of how religious institutions both shaped and were shaped by postwar urban America.

This volume chronicles the history of Catholic parishes in such major cities as Boston, Chicago, Detriot, New York and Philadelphia, linking their unique place in the urban landscape to the course of 20th-century American race relations.

Taking its cue from social critics and historians who have long looked toward Detroit to understand twentieth-century urban transformations, the author tells the story of Jews leaving the city while retaining a deep connection to it. He argues convincingly that though most Jews moved to the suburbs, urban abandonment, disinvestment, and more.

For more than a century, Harlem has been the epicenter of black America, the celebrated heart of African American life and culture - but it has also been a byword for the problems that have long plagued inner-city neighborhoods: poverty, crime, violence, disinvestment, and decay. This title offers an unprecedented record of urban change.

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.

Beginning a hundred years ago, this book paints an austere portrait of the conditions that early black residents found in isolated, poor suburbs. It explores how the civil rights movement emboldened more black families to purchase suburban homes and how the passage of civil rights legislation helped pave the way for today's black middle class.

Rejects the stereotypes of a conformist and conflict-free suburbia. This work argues that suburbia must be understood as a central factor in the modern American experience. It includes ten essays that challenge our understanding of suburbia. It reveals the role suburbs have played in the transformation of American liberalism and conservatism.

Traces public housing's history in Chicago from its New Deal roots through mayor Richard M Daley's Plan for Transformation. In the process, the author chronicles the Chicago Housing Authority's own transformation from the city's most progressive government agency to its largest slumlord.

Drawing on memoirs, private correspondences and other sources, this book examines the aftermath of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Despite rapid recovery and redevelopment, the author describes the social/political conflict and division that followed the fire.

From its founding in the late 1880s through the 1950s, Brownsville was a white, predominantly Jewish, working class neighbourhood. During the 1960s however the area became stigmatized as a black and Latino ghetto. This study focuses on the challenges of neighbourhood co-operation.

Recreates the daily life of the bar room from 1870 to 1920, exploring what it was like to be a "regular" in the old-time saloon of pre-prohibition industrial America. This study examines saloon-goers across America, including New York, Chicago, New Orleans and San Francisco.

Social workers produced thousands of case files about the poor during the interwar years. Analyzing almost two thousand such case files and traveling from Boston, Minneapolis, and Portland to London and Melbourne, this study examines how these stories of poverty were narrated and reshaped by ethnic diversity, economic crisis, and war.