Americas Urban History

Of all the great cities in the world, few personify their country like New York City. As America’s largest city and best known immigration gateway into the country, NYC represents the beauty, diversity, and sheer strength of the United States, a global financial center that has enticed people chasing the “American Dream” for centuries.

America's most storied urban underdog, Brooklyn has become an internationally recognized brand in recent decades - celebrated and scorned as one of the hippest destinations in the world. In Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, Thomas J. Campanella unearths long-lost threads of the urban past, telling the rich history of the rise, fall, and reinvention of one of the world’s most resurgent cities.

People have always been fascinated with the hidden, the mysterious, and the unexplained. Every society has its tall tales and ghost stories, its odd legends, and heroes. Also, every society has its stories of strange beasts, dangerous or benign, that live in the twilight world between the everyday and the legendary. Through most of history, people have been closely tied to nature, hunting in forests and having an intimate knowledge of the animals in their regions.

Rabies enjoys a fearsome and lurid reputation. Throughout the decades of spiraling growth that defined New York City from the 1840s to the 1910s, the bone-chilling cry of "Mad dog!" possessed the power to upend the ordinary routines and rhythms of urban life. In Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers, Jessica Wang examines the history of this rare but dreaded affliction during a time of rapid urbanization.

Rhea's neighborhood is fading away—the mom-and-pop shops of her childhood forced out to make space for an artisanal kombucha brewery here, a hot yoga studio there. And everywhere, the feeling that this place is no longer meant for her. Because while their little corner of South L.A. isn't perfect, to Rhea and her two best friends, it's something even more important—it's home. And it's worth protecting. But as more white people flock to their latest edgy, urban paradise, more of Rhea's friends and family are pushed out. Until Rhea decides it's time to push back.

In April 1938, Swift River Valley residents held a farewell ball to mark the demise of the quintessential New England town of Enfield and its three smaller neighbors, Greenwich, Dana, and Prescott. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts sacrificed these three towns to build the Quabbin, a massive reservoir of drinking water for residents of Boston. Three prominent residents attended the somber occasion.

Eric Bentley has chosen highlights from the 30-year record of the House Un-American Activities Committee to demonstrate HUAC's focus on artists, intellectuals, and performers. Volume 2: 1951-1952 includes the testimonies of Clifford Odets, Edward G. Robinson, Elia Kazan, Jose Ferrer, Bud Schulberg, Sterling Hayden, Abe Burroughs, Lillian Hellman, and many others. Thirty Years of Treason serves as a warning for the future and creates living history from the documentary record.

In Making the Second Ghetto, Arnold Hirsch argues that in the post-depression years Chicago was a "pioneer in developing concepts and devices" for housing segregation. 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.

With wit and sharp insight, former Traffic Commissioner of New York City, Sam Schwartz a.k.a. "Gridlock Sam", one of the most respected transportation engineers in the world and consummate insider in NYC political circles, uncovers how American cities became so beholden to cars and why the current shift away from that trend will forever alter America's urban landscapes, marking nothing short of a revolution in how we get from place to place.

Between 1817 and 1898, New York City evolved from a vital Atlantic port of trade to the center of American commerce and culture. Although this important urban transformation is well documented, the critical role of select Union soldiers turned New York engineers has, until now, remained largely unexplored.

Imperial San Francisco is the epic saga of how all great cities parasitize their hinterlands for the sake of those elites who own and run them by using the mass media at their command to shape the thought of those who unwittingly serve their interests. Using San Francisco as an example of how cities employ remote control technology to exploit water, energy, natural resources, and labor from an expansive imperium, it takes the listener from ancient Rome to the University of California’s role in the creation of nuclear weaponry and its first use.

In Sidewalking, David L. Ulin offers a compelling inquiry into the evolving landscape of Los Angeles. Part personal narrative, part investigation of the city as both idea and environment, Sidewalking is many things: a discussion of Los Angeles as urban space, a history of the city's built environment, a meditation on the author's relationship to the city, and a rumination on the art of urban walking.

America’s suburbs are not the homogenous places we sometimes take them for. Today’s suburbs are racially, ethnically, and economically diverse, with as many Democratic as Republican voters, a growing population of renters, and rising poverty. The cliche of white picket fences is well past its expiration date. The history of suburbia is equally surprising: American suburbs were once fertile ground for utopian planning, communal living, socially conscious design, and integrated housing. We have forgotten that we built suburbs like these....

The first European settlers saw America as a paradise regained. The continent seemed to offer a God-given opportunity to start again and build the perfect community. Those messianic days are gone. But as Alex Krieger argues in City on a Hill, any attempt at deep understanding of how the country has developed must recognize the persistent and dramatic consequences of utopian dreaming. Even as ideals have changed, idealism itself has for better and worse shaped our world of bricks and mortar, macadam, parks, and farmland.

In 1811, while escorting members of John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company up the Columbia River, their Chinookan guide refused to advance beyond a particular point that marked a boundary between his people and another indigenous group. Long before European contact, Native Americans created and maintained recognized borders, ranging from family hunting and fishing properties to larger tribal territories to vast river valley regions.

Every state has an urban legend that evokes fear and curiosity in equal parts, and we've chronicled all of these logic-defying horrors here in the Haunted States of America anthology. From the Jersey Devil to La Llorona, each story included introduces a new chill inducing, stomach churning monster, specter, or poltergeist certain to keep you up at night. A broad ranging collection of authors, including seasoned veterans and some first timers making a fright-tastic debut, have all united to unearth the scariest lore from each state in the US, as well as D.C. and Puerto Rico.

As gentrification encroaches on historic Harlem, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award recipient Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts untangles the myth and meaning of its storied legacy. Drawing on Harlem’s history and her own observations, Rhodes-Pitts introduces a variety of observers who shared a common hope that Harlem would become the ground from which Blacks fully entered America’s democracy.

During the years of the Early Republic, prominent Native leaders regularly traveled to American cities primarily on diplomatic or trade business, but also from curiosity. They were frequently referred to as "the Chiefs now in this city" during their visits. Colin Calloway has gathered together the accounts of these visits and created a new narrative of the country's formative years, redefining what has been understood as the "frontier." Calloway captures what Native peoples observed as they walked the streets, sat in pews, attended plays, drank in taverns, and slept in hotels.

St. Louis, despite its status as an inland river city frequently relegated to the backwaters of national significance, has stood at the crossroads of international matters for much of its history. From its 18th-century French fur trade origins to post-Cold War business dealings with Latin America and Asia, the city has never neglected nor been ignored by the world outside its borders.

How do we draw the lines between "good" and "bad" neighborhoods? How do we know “ghettos”? This book questions the widely held assumption that divisions between urban areas are reflections of varying amounts of crime, deprivation, and other social, cultural, and economic problems. Using Ogden, Utah, as a case study, Pepper Glass argues that urban reputations are “moral frontiers” that uphold and create divides between who is a good and respectable - or a bad and vilified - member of a community.