Books in the Historical Studies of Urban America (CHUP) series

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.

By the end of the 1920s, 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 unique migrant communities. This work unravels the many tensions that defined the experience of this group of American citizens before and after World War II.

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.

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.

Offers a narrative of the seventy-five-year struggle to house the "deserving poor." This title offers the novel concept of "design politics" to show how issues of architecture and urbanism are intimately bound up in thinking about policy.

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.

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.

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. Concerned more with winners and losers than with heroes and villains, this book offers a sober assessment of money and power in Jim Crow America.

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. This book suggests that the struggling city could not move forward to greatness until the old plants met the wrecking ball.

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.

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.

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.