Urban History: A Glass Half Full or Half Empty?

Charles Tilly , “What Good is Urban History?” Journal of Urban History 22 (1996): 702–19; Howard Gillette Jr. and Zane L. Miller , eds., American Urbanism: A Historiographical Review (New York, 1987); Gillette, “Rethinking American Urban History: New Directions for the Posturban Era,” Social Science History 14 (1990): 203–28.

Lewis Mumford , The City in History (New York, 1961); Warner Sam Bass , The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (New York, 1972); Kenneth T. Jackson , Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York, 1985); Thomas Bender , New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, From 1750 to the Beginning of our Own Time (New York, 1987).

Bender , “Whole or Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History,” Journal of American History 73(1986): 126–36; Zunz Olivier , “The Synthesis of Social Change: Reflections on American Social History,” in Zunz , ed., Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History (Chapel Hill, 1985).

I have argued this point in greater detail in Timothy J. Gilfoyle , “White Cities, Linguistic Turns, and Disneylands: Recent Paradigms in Urban History,” Reviews in American History 26(March 1998): 175–204; and Louis P. Masur , ed., The Challenge of American History (Baltimore, 1999), 175–204; reprinted as “The New Paradigms of Urban History,” in Chudacoff Howard and Peter C. Baldwin , eds., Major Problems in American Urban History, second edition (Boston, 2005).

Lewis Mumford , The Culture of Cities (New York, 1938); Olivier Zunz , The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920 (Chicago, 1982).

Lawrence Levine , Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1977); Lawrence Levine , Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA, 1988); Arnold Hirsch , Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (New York, 1983).

Paul Horgan , Lamy of Santa Fe, His Life and Times (New York, 1975); Leonard D. White , with assistance from Jean Schneider, The Republican Era: 1869–1901 (New York, 1958); Oliver W. Larkin , Art and Life in America (New York, 1949).

Edmund S. Morgan , The Birth of the Republic, 1763–89 (Chicago, 1956); Edmund S. Morgan , American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975); Eric Foner , Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970); Linda Gordon , Women's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York, 1976).

George Chauncey , Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World (New York, 1994); William Cronon , Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991); Adam Rome , The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmental-ism (New York, 2002); Christine Stansell , City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1790–1860 (New York, 1986).