The Southern Side of Chicago: Arnold R. Hirsch and the Renewal of Southern Urban History

Abstract

This essay maintains that Arnold R. Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago must be viewed as critical to the evolution of Southern history. The author shows how Hirsch’s handling of white anxiety, racial terrorism, and state actions in the preservation of racial segregation helped move Southern historians to adopt a comparative and structural approach to racial politics and metropolitan life. It also encouraged them to abandon interpretive frameworks that treated the South as exceptional, thus proving critical to the development of “Sunbelt” urban history. The fact of Hirsch’s own residing in the South and his collaborations with Southern historians during the publication of Making the Second Ghetto offers additional context to explain the book’s resonance in Southern historiography.