This book is about some of the largest events of the twentieth century, about international war, economic collapse, new science and technologies, and about the transformation of an old milltown region into a modern American metropolis. But it sees those sweeping changes through the eyes of fourteen particular Bostonians, in an ambitious attempt to understand the disorienting experiences of recent history. These lives span the years from 1850 to 1980, a time when Boston, like all American cities, was being rebuilt according to the continually changing specifications of science, engineering,...

This award-winning book charts the unfolding, from the Revolutionary War to the Great Depression, of the American tradition of city building and city living, using Philadelphia as a resonant example.

American Urban Form -- the spaces, places, and boundaries that define city life -- has been evolving since the first settlements of colonial days. The changing patterns of houses, buildings, streets, parks, pipes and wires, wharves, railroads, highways, and airports reflect changing patterns of the social, political, and economic processes that shape the city. In this book, Sam Bass Warner and Andrew Whittemore map more than three hundred years of the American city through the evolution of urban form. They do this by offering an illustrated history of "the City" -- a hypothetical...