Review Essay: INTEGRATING EDUCATION HISTORY AND URBAN HISTORY The Politics of Schools and Cities

Bernard Bailyn , Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunity for Study (New York, 1960); Lawrence Cremin , The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley: An Essay on the Historiography of American Education ( New York, 1965); and Lawrence Cremin , Traditions of American Education (New York, 1977 ). See also Paul H. Buck , Clarence Faust , Richard Hofstadter , Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. , and Richard Storr , The Role of Education in American History (New York, 1957) and Douglas Sloan , "Historiography and the History of Education ," Review of Research in Education 1 (1973): 239-48.

Victoria Hattam and Joseph Lowndes , "Rethinking the Democratic Synthesis" (paper delivered to the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Washington, D. C., September 3, 2005).

Renderings of the traditional backlash interpretation include Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall , Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York, 1992); Kenneth D. Durr , Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980 ( Chapel Hill, 2003). Sources that promote the civil rights movement as a Southern story, with either little or negative attention to the North include, for instance, Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, 19541980 (New York, 1981); Patricia Sullivan , Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill , 1996); and Clayborne Carson , In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, 1981).

Both Bruce Schulman , From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980 (New York , 1991) and Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle , eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (Princeton, 1989) offer a critique of the welfare state and its role in obfuscating black access to equal opportunities. Works that argue for a longer historical trajectory of white resistance to African American mobility and earlier deindustrialization of urban centers than is typically thought include Thomas J. Sugrue , Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit ( Princeton, 1996); Robert O. Self , American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2003); Ronald H. Bayor , Race and the Shaping of Twentieth Century Atlanta (Chapel Hill, 1996); Douglass S. Massey and Nancy Denton , American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass ( Cambridge, 1993). Sources that takes issue with the singular southern version of the civil rights movement include Jeanne F. Theoharis and Komozi Woodard , eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940-1980 (New York, 2003) and Matthew Countryman , Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 2005), for example. On issues of urban and suburban space, see Self, American Babylon; Steven Gregory , Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community (Princeton, 1998); Becky Nicolaides , My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 ( Chicago, 2002); and Kenneth Jackson , Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States ( New York, 1985).

Important exceptions include Matthew Countryman , Up South and Wendell Pritchett , Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews and the Changing Face of the Ghetto ( Chicago, 2002), for example, both of which devote chapters to the battles to control urban schooling and treat them as critical incidents in the shaping of the political, racial, and economic landscape of Philadelphia and Brooklyn, respectively. Both accounts recast the role of communities, race, and politics in their analyses, rooting them more deeply in what came before, in the agency of the communities themselves, and in the persistence of African American efforts to claim their rights of citizenship, through different strategies, over time. On the other hand, examples such as Jeffrey Mirel's The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System, Detroit 1907-81 (Ann Arbor, 1993), which focuses particularly on the fate of the Detroit school system within the larger urban context during this period, or Jerald Podair 's The Strike that Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis (New Haven , 2002), about the Ocean Hill-Brownsville community control conflict, both subscribe to a more traditional narrative of the postwar era, in which the demands of the civil rights movement ultimately destroyed the New Deal coalition and the hope for liberal reform.

See Nikhil Pal Singh , Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, 2005 ) for a characterization of the "short civil rights movement;" see also sources cited earlier, including Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis; Self, American Babylon; and Massey and Denton, American Apartheid.

See Anthony Lukas , Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (New York, 1985) and Ronald Formisano , Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill, 1991), for example.

National Commission on Excellence in Education , A Nation at Risk (Washington D.C., 1983 ).

See Susan Fuhrman , "Less than Meets the Eye: Standards, Testing, and Fear of Federal Control," in Noel Epstein , ed., Who's in Charge Here? The Tangled Web of School Governance and Policy (Denver, 2004), 131-163; and Lorraine McDonnell , "No Child Left Behind and the Federal Role in Education: Evolution or Revolution?" Peabody Journal of Education 80 (2005): 19-38.

See, for example, David Tyack , The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, 1974); Paula Fass , Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (New York, 1991); Herbert M. Kliebard , The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958 (New York, 1987); and Marjorie Murphy , Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900-1980 (Ithaca, 1990).

Several good sources on the contributions of middle-class female reformers to the creation of the welfare state include Robyn Muncy , Creating a Female Dominion of American Reform, 1890-1935 (New York, 1994); Ellen Fitzpatrick , Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York, 1994 ); Sandra Adickes , To Be Young Was Very Heaven: Women in New York Before the First World War (New York, 1997); Linda Gordon , Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Cambridge, 1998); and Molly Ladd-Taylor , Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 18901930 (Urbana, 1994 ). Examples of works examining the lives of poor or working-class women in early twentieth-century Northern cities include Timothy J. Gilfoyle , City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (New York, 1994); Susan Levine , Labor's True Woman: Carpet Weavers, Industrialization, and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age (Philadelphia, 1984); and Eileen Boris , Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (New York, 1994).

Kate Rousmaniere , City Teachers: Teaching and School Reform in Historical Perspective (New York, 1997 ), 8.

Pieroth's work subscribes to what might be called an older form of women's history, as described by Joan Wallach Scott , "Women's History ," in her book of essays, Gender and the Politics of History ( New York, 1999, Rev. ed.), 15-27.