Books in the Historical Studies of Urban America series

"One of the most enduring American urban myths concerns the death of the Red Car Trolley, an extensive and equitable system in Los Angeles County that some say was weakened and then eradicated by US car manufacturers. Yet as Nicholas Dagen Bloom shows, an array of larger yet less tangible forces together interacted to practically murder public transportation of all kinds in cities nationwide. Most centrally, public transit collapsed because essentially we wanted it to-no conspiracy necessary. Detailing the histories of transportation in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco, Bloom seeks to set all of our transit myths to rest for the sake not only of accuracy but in order to enrich our conversations about public transportation funding today"--

"In this classic and groundbreaking work of urban history, Arnold Hirsch argues that after the Depression, Chicago was a "pioneer in developing concepts and devices" for housing segregation. Moreover, Hirsch shows that the legal framework for the national urban renewal effort was forged in the heat generated by the racial struggles waged on Chicago's South Side. His chronicle of the strategies used by ethnic, political, and business interests in reaction to the great migration of southern blacks in the 1940s describes how the violent reaction of an emergent "white" population combined with public policy to segregate the city-and the nation. The new edition features a visionary afterword by N.D.B. Connolly"--

Contesting claims that postwar American liberalism retreated from fights against unemployment and economic inequality, this book reveals that such efforts did not collapse after the New Deal but instead began to flourish at the local, rather than the national, level.

"The story of how American banks helped disenfranchise nonwhite urbanities and condemn to blight the very neighborhoods that needed the most investment is infuriating. And yet, by digging into the history of urban finance, Rebecca Marchiel here illuminates how urban activists changed some banks' behavior to support investment in communities that they had once abandoned. These developments, in turn, affected federal urban policy and reshaped banks' understanding of the role that urban communities play in the financial system. The legacy of reinvestment activism is clouded, but Marchiel's detailing of it transforms our understanding of the history and significance of community/bank relations"--

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.

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.

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.

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. This book offers accounts of public markets and private food shops; and cake and coffee shops.

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. The author details this fascinating transition.

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.

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.

From its appearance as a 'fashionable dissipation' centered on the immigrant and working-class districts of 1880s New York through its spread to Chicago and into the 1930s nightspots frequented by lesbians and gay men, this book charts the development of slumming.

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. The author traces changing responses to the challenging issues that most affected day-to-day life in the world's cities.

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, this book provides history to examine the migration and settlement of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in the postwar era.

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.