Talk:American urban history

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New page

I'm putting together a new article on American urban history and my tentative outline looks like this: Comments are most welcome!Rjensen (talk) 14:28, 6 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed outline


A. Historiography of Cities
1. Biography: Bessie Pierce on Chicago
2. Harvard: Arthur Schlesinger Sr ("urbanization") & Oscar Handlin (modernization)
3. Chicago: geography & structure: Mayer & Wade (1968)
a) Frank Jewell, Annotated Bibliog of Chicago History (1979)
4. Journal of Urban History; H-URBAN; city encyclopedias (New York; Chicago, etc museums (Chicago Historical Society)
B. SYLLABI and discussions by academics: at H-URBAN
C. Introduction to the City
1. definition of city/urban/metropolitan
a) towns, villages; rural and farm
2. City Functions & Types: trade, manufacturing, service; governing
a) Hinterlands and Hierarchy: Systems of Cities
b) locations: transportation; seaports; riverports; rail & air; (Allan Pred)
D. Colonial Cities: Philadelphia, Boston, NYC (Carl Bridenbaugh)
E. Changing City Structure, 1800-1860
1. Walking City to Streetcar City (Sam Bass Warner); neighborhoods; Kenneth Scherzer on NYC
2. Boosters and Promoters (Daniel Boorstin 1965)
3. Gender Roles (Christine Stansell; Thomas Gilfoyle on sex); Schoolteachers
4. Civil War Crisis (James Gallman on Philadelphia)
5. Western cities as spearhead of frontier (Richard Wade)
F. Rapid Growth in Late 19th Century
1. New York City's dominance in $, commerce, culture
2. demographic studies (Theodore Hershberg on Philadelphia)(David Ward)
3. Middle Cities (Lynd & Lynd, "Middletown")
4. Small Town America (Lewis Atherton)
5. Role of railroads; Chicago and Kansas City (William Cronon)
6. South: Lack of urban centers: local trade centers; urban slavery
G. Class
1. Elites (Frederic Jaher)(Edward Pessen)
a) Business: finance, manufacturing, trade (John Ingham)
b) Professional: law. medicine, religion; academe
c) cultural monuments: Chicago in 1890s; (Helen Horowitz)
d) literature (Carl S. Smith)(Teaford 1993, ch 5)
2. Middle class: brain power & office workers (Olivier Zunz, Daniel Rodgers on work ethic; Daniel Nelson)
3. Working Class (Richard Oestreicher; James Barrett, Walter Licht)
a) Labor Unions (skilled craftsmen)(Herbert Gutman; )
4. Lower Class; welfare, crime & violence (Eric Monkkonen, Roger
Lane); saloons (Perry Duis)
5. Neighborhoods (Dominic Candeloro, Louise Wade)
6. Social Mobility: Stephan Thernstrom and "New Urban History"; census studies; city directory research
H. Ethnicity: (Harvard Ency. of American Ethnic Groups [1980]; Oscar Handlin; Thomas Archdeacon; John Bodnar)
1. Old Immigration
a) British (Rowland Berthoff); Germans (Hartmut Keil & John Jentz; Stanley Nadel)
b) Irish Catholics (Jay Dolan, James Sanders; David Gerber; Hasia Diner on Irish women)
c) old stock; Yankees & YMCA (Charles Hopkins)
2. New Immigration: Italian, Slavic, Jewish (Humbert Nelli; Edward Kantowitz; Melvin Holli and Peter Jones, eds.)
3. Religion (Martin Marty); Catholic Church & parishes (Jay Dolan)
4. Jewish subculture (Hasia Diner, Irving Howe)
I. Urban Politics
1. Rise of machines and bosses; Tweed's New York (Zane Miller)(Harold Gosnell)(Harold Zink); mayors: Holli & Jones, ed. 1981
2. successful management (Jon Teaford)
3. Voting Patterns; City as an issue (1896) (Jensen)
4. Who Governs? (pluralism--Robert Dahl); elites (Floyd Hunter)
J. Progressive Reform
1. Triumph of the City: Chicago World's Fair 1893
2. Parks and Planning: F.L. Olmstead, Daniel Burnham (Thomas Hines)
3. City Architecture; Louis Sullivan (Carl Condit)
4. Experts and Professions; (Samuel Hays)
5. Structural vs Social Reform (Melvin Holli)
6. Religious reform; Jane Addams & settlement houses (Allen Davis)
7. child labor & compulsory education; high school (David Tyack)
K. Streetcar City to Automobile City (Sam Bass Warner)
1. Technology of Automobile (Clay McShane; John Rae; Paul Barrett)
2. Electricity (Mark Rose on Denver; Forrest McDonald on Insull; Harold Platt)
3. City Spatial Patterns: "Chicago ecology models" (Louis Wirth)
L. Culture Conflict of the 1920s
1. Popular culture: Sports, Movies & Parks (Roy Rozenzweig; Robert Caro on Robert Moses)
2. Prohibition & Bootlegging: Law and Order; Repeal (David Kyvig)
3. Ethnic responses to popular culture (Lizabeth Cohen, Making a new deal: Industrial workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. (1991.)
M. The Great Depression
1. Differential unemployment (Jensen in J Interdisc. Hist 1989)
2. collapse of city finances; feds & states to rescue; sales tax [Charles H. Trout, Boston, the Great Depression, and the New Deal (1977)]
3. rise of CIO; John L Lewis; Dubofsky & Van Tine;
4. LaGuardia of New York (Thomas Kessner)
5. FDR, WPA & Democratic Machine; ethnics mobilized (John Allswang)(Bruce Stave on Pittsburgh)
N. African American Ghettoes (Thomas Sugrue)
1. to World War I (W.E.B. DuBois on Philadelphia; Alan Spear; Gilbert Osofsky)
2. Great Migration and Ghetto (James Grossman; Nicholas Lemann, The promised land: The great black migration and how it changed America (2011)
3. Race Riots & white ethnics (1919, WW2, 1960s)(William Tuttle)(Arnold Hirsch)
4. Black religion; Baptist & Methodist ministers; storefronts
5. Black Politics; from GOP to Democrats (1936) (Harold Gosnell, Nancy Weiss)
6. Segregation; desegregation in South; busing; de facto segregation
7. Civil Rights; NAACP; Martin Luther King (Taylor Branch; David Garrow) Jesse Jackson
8. Power & Independence: 1970-present; Harold Washington (Paul Kleppner)
O. Postwar Crises
1. WW2: Wartime Migration; Industry; Prosperity (Perry Duis; A. J. Baime, The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America (2014)
2. Last Hurrah: Machines collapse; Richard J. Daley (Roger Biles)
3. Urban Renewal, Public Housing and City Planning [John F. Bauman, Public housing, race, and renewal: Urban planning in Philadelphia, 1920-1974 (1987)]
4. Federal policy: Arnold Hirsch & Raymond Mohl [1993]
5. Highways, Housing & Crabgrass Frontier; (Kenneth Jackson; Scott Donaldson; Robert Fishman)
6. Pollution, smog, and environmental issues (Michael Logan; Joel A. Tarr, The search for the ultimate sink: urban pollution in historical perspective (1996.)
P. Regions: West & South (David Goldfield); Midwest (Jon Teaford)
1. Post 1900: Atlanta, Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Dallas
2. Post WW2 "Sunbelt" (Carl Abbott)
3. Political conservatism in the suburbs (Lisa McGirr)
4. Tax resistance (Purcell, Mark. "Ruling Los Angeles: Neighborhood movements, urban regimes, and the production of space in southern California." Urban Geography 18.8 (1997): 684-704.)
Q. "Urban Crisis" Years, 1964-1980
1. Riots, Busing, White Flight (Allen Matusow)
2. Deindustrialization & Collapse of the Rust belt: Detroit, Gary [Hartley, Daniel. "Urban decline in rust-belt cities." Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Economic Commentary 2013#06 (2013).]
3. Poverty & Central City as Welfare State (Michael Katz; James Paterson)
4. Drugs, Crime & the Prison Boom. (Anne Heinz, Herbert Jacob & Robert Lineberry)
5. the sad saga of Detroit (Paul Kersey, Detroit: The Unauthorized Autopsy of America's Bankrupt Black Metropolis (2014)
6. the happy saga of New York City [Frederick Siegel, The prince of the city: Giuliani, New York, and the genius of American life (2005); Julian Brash, Bloomberg's New York: class and governance in the luxury city (2011).
7. Hurricane New Orleans (Kevin Fox Gotham and Miriam Greenberg, Crisis Cities: Disaster and Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans (2014)
R. New Functions and Revivals
1. The Service City: Nashville & Dallas [Bill Carey, Fortunes, Fiddles and Fried Chicken : A Business History of Nashville (2000); Harvey J. Graff, The Dallas Myth: The Making and Unmaking of an American City (2010)
2. Information Centers; Money & Knowledge; Silicon Valley [Doug Menuez and Elliot Erwitt, Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley 1985-2000 (2014); AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (1996)
3. Edge Cities (Joel Garreau, 1991): new suburban nodes
5. Rise of the shopping mall, 1960-2010 [Vicki Howard, From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store (2015)]
6. The New Immigration: LA and Miami (Sanford Ungar; Thomas Muller)
7. vision of the future: LA as City of Quartz (Mike Davis)
8. Gentrification [Loretta Lees and Tom Slater, eds. The Gentrification Reader (2010)]

Suggestions? Rjensen (talk) 19:48, 6 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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No Post WWII chapter

There isn't a single word about the post WWII suburban sprawl, interstate building, white flight and the demolition of transit systems, mostly trolleys. Kristo Mefisto (talk) 18:47, 8 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]