America's cities: celebrated by poets, courted by politicians, castigated by social reformers. In their numbers and complexity they challenge comprehension. Why is urban America the way it is? Eric Monkkonen offers a fresh approach to the myths and the history of US urban development, giving us an unexpected and welcome sense of our urban origins. His historically anchored vision of our cities places topics of finance, housing, social mobility, transportation, crime, planning, and growth into a perspective which explains the present in terms of the past and ofers a point from which to plan for the future. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988 with a paperback in 1990.

As the first ethnohistory of modern urban Indians, this perceptive study looks at Indians from many tribes living in cities throughout the United States. Fixico has had unparalleled access to Native Americans, particularly their contemporary oral tradition. Through firsthand observations, interviews, and conventional historical sources, he has been able to assess the major impact urbanization has had on Indians and see how they have come to terms with both the negative and enriching aspects of living in cities. The result is an insightful and empathetic account of how Indian identity is sustained in cities. Today two-thirds of all Indians live in cities. Many of these urban Indians are third- or fourth-generation city dwellers, the descendants of those who first came to urban areas during the federal government's push for relocation from the late 1940s through the 1960s. Fixico looks at both groups of urban Native Americans--those who first settled in cities some fifty years ago and those who have grown up there in the past thirty years--and finds in their experiences a record of survival and adaptation. Fixico offers a new view of urban Indians, one centered on questions of how their modern identity emerges and perseveres. He shows how the corrosive effects of cultural alienation, alcoholism, poor health services, unemployment, and ghetto housing are slowly being overcome, particularly since the 1970s. After fifty years of urban experiences, Native Americans living in cities are better able today than at any other time to balance tradition and modernity.

Why do some cities grow and expand, while others dwindle and decline? Why is Milwaukee a town of the past, while Minneapolis-St. Paul seems reborn and infused with future dynamism? And what do Milwaukee and the Twin Cities have to tell us about other cities' prospects, the trials and destinies of industrial Cleveland and post-industrial Austin? Anthony Orum's new book tells the story of these cities and, at the same time, of all cities. Here the urban past, present, and future are woven into one compelling tale. Orum traces the shift in the sources of urban growth from entrepreneurs to institutions and highlights the emergence of local government as a prominent force—indeed, as an institution—in shaping the trajectory of the urban industrial heartland. This complex trajectory includes all aspects of urban boom and bust: population trends, economic prosperity, politics and culture, as well as hard-to-pin-down qualities like a city's collective hope and vision. Interspersing social theory, historical ethnography, and comparative analysis to help explain the fates of different cities, Orum lucidly portrays factory openings, labor strikes, elections, evictions, urban blight, white flight, recession, and rejuvenation to show the core histories—and future shape—of cities beyond the particulars presented in these pages. The reader will discover the key people and politics of cities along with the forces that direct them. With a rich variety of sources including newspapers, diaries, census materials, maps, photo essays, and, perhaps most captivating, original oral histories, City-Building in America is ideal for anyone interested in urban transformation and for courses in urban sociology, urban politics, industrial sociology, social change, and social mobility.

How did American cities change throughout the 20th and early 21st century? This timely publication integrates research from American Literary and Cultural Studies, Urban Studies and History. The essays range from negotiations of the »ethnic city« in US literature and media, to studies of recent urban phenomena and their representations: gentrification, re-appropriation and conversion of urban spaces in the USA. These interdisciplinary and intercultural perspectives on American cities provide unique points of access for studying the complex narratives of urban transformation.

Archaeology of Urban America: The Search for Pattern and Process is composed of three parts, namely, Strategies and Methods; Site Formation, Structure, and Pattern; and Artifact Analysis and Interpretation. The Strategies and Methods section centers on the general questions asked by urban archaeologists, as well as on the ways they design their research to elucidate those questions. The Site Formation, Structure, and Pattern section is generally comprised of chapters classified as ""test cases"" emphasizing the approaches, interpretation, and even direct extension of larger research designs. Lastly, the Artifact Analysis and Interpretation section deals with intersite and intrasite patterning of artifact assemblages, as well as with specific class of artifacts. This material will help stimulate a dialogue among archaeologists who have chosen the American city as their subject. This book will also be useful to urban sociologists, economists, cultural anthropologists, and historians.

This volume of Transport and Sustainability focuses on how spatial and social mobilities are intertwined in the reproduction of spatial and social inequities in Latin American cities.

Urban Rehearsals and Novel Plots in the Early American City sheds new light on the literature of the early US by exploring how literature, theatre, architecture, and images worked together to allow readers to imagine themselves as urbanites even before cities developed. In the four decades following the Revolutionary War, the new nation was a loose network of nascent cities connected by print. Before a national culture could develop, local city cultures took shape; literary texts played key roles in helping new Americans become city people. Drawing on extensive archival research, Urban Rehearsals argues that literature, particularly novels and plays, allowed Bostonians to navigate the transition from colonial town to post-revolution city, enabled Philadelphians to grieve their experiences of the 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic and rebuild in the epidemic's aftermath, and showed New Yorkers how the domestic practices that reinforced their urbanity could be opened to the broader public. Throughout, attention to underrepresented voices and texts calls attention to the possibilities for women, immigrants, and Black Americans in developing urban spaces, while showing how those possibilities would be foreclosed as the nation developed. Balancing attention to canonical texts of the early Republic, including The Power of Sympathy, Charlotte Temple, and Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, with novels whose depiction of early cities deserves greater attention, such as Ormond, The Boarding-School, Monima, and Kelroy, this volume shows how US cities developed on the pages and stages of the early Republic, building urban imaginations that would construct the nation's early cities.

Urban Rehearsals and Novel Plots in the Early American City sheds new light on the literature of the early US by exploring how literature, theatre, architecture, and images worked together to allow readers to imagine themselves as urbanites even before cities developed. In the four decades following the Revolutionary War, the new nation was a loose network of nascent cities connected by print. Before a national culture could develop, local city cultures took shape; literary texts played key roles in helping new Americans become city people. Drawing on extensive archival research, Urban Rehearsals argues that literature, particularly novels and plays, allowed Bostonians to navigate the transition from colonial town to post-revolution city, enabled Philadelphians to grieve their experiences of the 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic and rebuild in the epidemic's aftermath, and showed New Yorkers how the domestic practices that reinforced their urbanity could be opened to the broader public. Throughout, attention to underrepresented voices and texts calls attention to the possibilities for women, immigrants, and Black Americans in developing urban spaces, while showing how those possibilities would be foreclosed as the nation developed. Balancing attention to canonical texts of the early Republic, including The Power of Sympathy, Charlotte Temple, and Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, with novels whose depiction of early cities deserves greater attention, such as Ormond, The Boarding-School, Monima, and Kelroy, this volume shows how US cities developed on the pages and stages of the early Republic, building urban imaginations that would construct the nation's early cities.

We are an urban nation and have been so, officially at least, since the early twentieth century. But long before then, our cities played crucial roles in the economic and political development of the nation, as magnets for immigrants from here and abroad, and as centers of culture and innovation. They still do. Yet, the discipline that we call "Urban History" is really a phenomenon of post-World War II scholarship. Now, after a generation of pathbreaking scholarship that has reoriented and enlightened our perception of the American city, the two volumes of the Encyclopedia of American Urban History offer both a summary and an interpretation of the field. With contributions from leading academics in their fields, this authoritative resource offers an interdisciplinary approach by covering topics from economics, geography, anthropology, politics, and sociology. Key Features Addresses the rise of urban America using a concise, readable, and historical format Focuses on the 20th century—a century with the most dramatic urban growth and a time when the United States transformed from being a nation of shopkeepers and farmers to an urban industrial, and then post-industrial society Defines "urban" broadly, including suburban environments, and even something new and, literally, far out, called "penurbia" Offers both a referential and a reverential approach to produce a work that functions as a research tool and as a commemoration of scholarship Includes contributions from leading academics and scholars as well as from those who work for non-profits, governments, and corporations The Encyclopedia of American Urban History is a fundamental reference work intended to ground and inspire future research in the field. It is an essential resource for any academic library.