The American Urban Reader ─ History and Theory

The American Urban Reader brings together the most exciting work on the evolution of the American city, from colonial settlement and western expansion to post-industrial cities and the growth of the suburbs. Each of the chronologically and thematically organized chapters includes thoughtfully selected scholarly essays from historians, social scientists and journalists, which are supplemented by relevant primary documents that offer more nuanced perspectives and convey the diversity and interdisciplinary nature of the study of the urban condition. A comprehensive companion website offers valuable further reading, compelling supplementary links, slideshows of additional images, and a dialogue opening blog written by one of the authors.
Lisa Krissoff Boehm and Steven H. Corey together bring thirty-five years of classroom experience in urban studies and history, and have selected a range of work that is dynamically written and carefully edited to be accessible to students and appropriate for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of how American cities have developed.
For additional information and classroom resources please visit The American Urban Reader companion website at www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415803984.

Steven Hunt Corey is Professor and Chair of the Department of Urban Studies at Worcester State University, Worcester, MA.
Lisa Krissoff Boehm is Professor of Urban Studies and Director of the Honors Program at Worcester State University in Worcester, MA. She is the author of Popular Culture and the Enduring Myth of Chicago, 1871-1968 (Routledge) and Making a Way out of No Way: African American Women and the Second Great Migration.

Acknowledgments
List of Figures. Tables, and Illustrations
Foreword by John Bodnar
Preface



　
Part One: Definitions and Perspectives

Editors’ Introduction to Part One

Essays

1. Examining America’s Urban Landscape: From Social
Reform to Social History (2010)
Steven H. Corey and Lisa Krissoff Boehm

2. The City in American Civilization (1949)
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.

3. Urbanism and Suburbanism as Ways of Life:
A Reevaluation of Definitions (1962, 1991)
Herbert J. Gans

4. Beyond Blade Runner (1998)
Mike Davis

5. Crossing the City Line (1999)
Robert A. Orsi

Documents

1.1 The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring
Population of New York (1845)
John H. Griscom

1.2 Advice to Strangers (1876)
Robert Macoy

1.4 The Use of Sidewalks: Assimilating Children (1961)
Jane Jacobs

　
Part Two: Urban Roots: Colonial Settlement and Westward Expansion
Editors’ Introduction to Part Two

Essays

1. Boston and New York in the Eighteenth Century (1981)
Pauline Maier

2. Urban Life in Western America, 1790-1830 (1958)
Richard C. Wade

3. Pearls on the Coast and Lights in the Forest (1982)
David R. Goldfield

Documents

2.1 A Model of Christian Charity (1630)
John Winthrop

2.2 Philadelphia in 1697
Benjamin Bullivant

2.3 Envisioning Great American Indian Cities (1813)
Henry Marie Brackenridge

　
Part Three: The New City: Industry and Immigrants, 1820s-1920s
Editors’ Introduction to Part Three
Essays

1. From Milling to Manufacturing:
From Villages to Mill Towns (2001)
John T. Cumbler

2. Women in the Neighborhoods (1986)
Christine Stansell

3. Old and New Immigrants in Greater New York City,
1880 to World War I (1995)
Frederick M. Binder and David M. Reimers

4. Ethnic Islands: The Emergence of
Urban Chinese America (1989)
Ronald T. Takaki

5. The Pullman Strike and Making Sense of an Age (1995)
Carl Smith
Documents

3.1 Vesey Slave Revolt, Charleston, South Carolina (1822)

3.2. Tredegar and Armory Iron Works, Richmond, Virginia (1847)

3.3 Riots, Louisville, Kentucky (1855)

3.4 Debates on Chinese Immigration (1876)

3.5 The Mixed Crowd (1890)
Jacob Riis

3.6. Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, New York City (1911)
　
Part Four City Life From the Bottom Up, 1860s-1940s
Editors’ Introduction to Part Four
Essays
1. The "Guns" of Gotham (2006)
Timothy Gilfoyle
2. The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth Century America (2007)
Wendy Gamber
3. Urban Culture and the Policing of the
"City of Bachelors" (1994)
George Chauncey
Documents

4.1 The Physiology of New York Boarding-Houses (1857)
Thomas Butler Gunn

4.2 Sister Carrie (1900)
Theodore Dreiser

4. 3 Strange Brother (1931)
Blair Niles
　
Part Five: Managing the Metropolis
Editors’ Introduction to Part Five

Essays

1. The "Spoils of the Park" (1992)
Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar

2. New Deal City (1989)
Thomas Kessner

3. Messiah Mayors and the Gospel of Urban Hype (1990)
Jon C. Teaford

4. The Katrina Conspiracies:
The Problem of Trust in Rebuilding an American City (2009)
Arnold Hirsch and A. Lee Levert
Documents

5.1 On the Social Uses of Central Park (1864)
Frederic B. Perkins

5.2 William Tweed’s Confession (1878).

5.3 Philadelphia: Corrupted and Contented (1903)
Lincoln Steffens

5.4 Wacker’s Manual of the Plan of Chicago (1913)
Walter D. Moody

5. 5 Hull-House, A Social Settlement (1894)
Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr

5.6 Growing up with a City (1926)
Louise de Koven Bowen

5.7 On the Way Up: Charlotte and Kansas City (1976)
5.8 President Arrives in Alabama,
Briefed on Hurricane Katrina (2005)

　
Part Six: The Urban Environment

Editors’ Introduction to Part Six
Essays

1. The Metabolism of the Industrial City:
The Case of Pittsburgh (2002)
Joel Tarr

2. Houston: The Energy Metropolis (2007)
Martin Melosi and Joseph Pratt

3. The Emergence of Silicon Valley:
High-Tech Development and Ecocide, 1950-2001 (2002)
David Naguib Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park
Documents

6.1 Special Message to the Congress on Conservation and
Restoration of Natural Beauty (1965)
President Lyndon B. Johnson

6.2 Toxic Waste and Race in the United States (1987)
United Church of Christ, 1987.

Part Seven: Transportation & Physical Mobility
Editors' Introduction to Part Seven
Essays

1. From Walking City to the Implementation of the
Street Railways (1962)
Sam Bass Warner, Jr.

2. The Subway and the City (1993)
Clifton Hood

3. Wishful Thinking: Downtown and the
Automobile Revolution (2001)
Robert Fogelson
Documents
7.1 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act (1956)

7.2 "$14.6 Billion Later, Boston’s Big Dig Wraps Up,"
Christian Science Monitor (2003)
Seth Stern


Part Eight: Urban Migrations and Social Mobility
Editors’ Introduction to Part Eight
Essays

1. The Second Ghetto and the Dynamics of
Neighborhood (1983, 1998)
Arnold Hirsch

2. Making a Way out of No Way: African American
Women and the Second Great Migration (2009)
Lisa Krissoff Boehm

3. The Great White Migration, 1945-1960 (2000)
Chad Berry

4. Citizenship and Civil Rights, 1964-1974 (2009)
Melanie Shell-Weiss
Documents

8.1 Tulsa Race Riots, 1921

8.2 Ku Klux Klan Initiation, Worcester, Massachusetts (1924)

8.3 Zoot Suit Riots (1943)

8.4 The Dollmaker (1954)
Harriette Arnow

8.5 Hunger of Memory (1982)
Richard Rodriguez



Part Nine: Race and the Post-War Metropolis
Editors’ Introduction to Part Nine

Essays

1. Class, Status and Residence:
The Changing Geography of Black Detroit (1996)
Thomas J. Sugrue

2. White Noose (2003)
Robert Self

3. The Beginning of the End of the Modern Ghetto (2000)
Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh
Documents

9.1 Housing Act of 1949

9.2 The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955)
Sloan Wilson

9.3 Watts Riots, 1965

9.4 Urban Indians (1964-1969)

9.5 Oakland Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Ten Point Plan
Oakland Black Panthers (1966)

9.6 All Souls (1999)
Michael Patrick MacDonald

9.7 Address to the Nation on the Civil Disturbances in Los
Angeles, California (1992)

9. 8 Hispanic Communities and Urban Public Schools (2009)
Arne Duncan

　
Part Ten: Exurbia and Postindustrial Cities
Editors’ Introduction to Part Ten
Essays

1. Commerce: Reconfiguring Community Marketplaces (2003)
Lizabeth Cohen

2. Inventing Las Vegas (2003)
Hal Rothman

3. Polo Ponies and Penalty Kicks (2005)
Corey Dolgon
Documents

10.1 Garden Cities of To-Morrow (1902)
Ebenezer Howard

10.2 Looking Backward (1887)
Edward Bellamy

10.3 Charter of the New Urbanism (1996)
Congress for the New Urbanism

10.4 "American Murder Mystery," The Atlantic (2008)
Hanna Rosin

10.5 Reflecting Absence (2003)

　
Bibliography
Copyright Information
Index