Books in the Historical Studies of Urban America series

"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"--

"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"--

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.

"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"--

"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"--

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.