In "Selling the Race," Adam Green 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. Along the way, he offers fascinating reinterpretations of such events as the 1940 American Negro Exposition, the rise of black music and the culture industry that emerged around it, the development of the Associated Negro Press and the founding of Johnson Publishing, and the outcry over the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till.

By presenting African...

Building its incisive narrative from a wide range of archival...

"The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal "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. With a sweep that encompasses New York, London, Berlin, Philadelphia, and Toronto, among others, Christopher Klemek traces changing responses to the challenging issues that most affected the lives of the world s cities.
In the postwar decades, the principles of modernist planning came to be challenged in the grassroots revolts against the building of...

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 century, new technologies began to light up streets, sidewalks, buildings, and public spaces. Peter C. Baldwin s evocative book depicts the changing experience of the urban night over this period, visiting a host of actors scavengers, newsboys, and mashers alike in the nocturnal city.

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, andPortland to London and Melbourne, "Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse" is a pioneering comparative study that examines how these stories of poverty were narrated and reshaped by ethnic diversity, economic crisis, and war.Probing the similarities and differences in the ways Americans, Australians, and Britons understood and responded to poverty, Mark Peel draws a picture of social work that is based...

When we think of segregation, what often comes to mind is apartheid South Africa, or the American South in the age of Jim Crow--two societies fundamentally premised on the concept of the separation of the races. But as Carl H. Nightingale shows us in this magisterial history, segregation is everywhere, deforming cities and societies worldwide.

Starting with segregation's ancient roots, and what the archaeological evidence reveals about humanity's long-standing use of urban divisions to reinforce political and economic inequality, Nightingale then moves to the world of European...

Brown in the Windy Cityis the first history to examine the migration and settlement of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in postwar Chicago. Lilia Fernandez reveals how the two populations arrived in Chicago in the midst of tremendous social and economic change and, in spite of declining industrial employment and massive urban renewal projects, managed to carve out a geographic and racial place in one of America s great cities. Through their experiences in the city s central neighborhoods over the course of these three decades, Fernandez demonstrates how Mexicans and Puerto Ricans...

Building its incisive narrative from a wide range of archival...