History of American Cities

Objective:
This is an upper-division undergraduate course whose purpose is to provide a survey of urban history in the United States from the colonial period through the end of the 20^th century. Topics include colonial beginnings, westward expansion, the industrial city, changing technologies, changes in urban social and spatial structure, urban politics, migration and immigration, city boosterism, suburbanization, national urban policy, social movements, urban economic decline, and central city revitalization. There will be a special emphasis on issues of race, gender, and class as key factors in the evolution of American urban history.

Texts:
Chudacoff, H.P., and J.E. Smith.

The Evolution of American Urban Society. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1994 (4^th edition).

Chudacoff, H.P., ed.

Major Problems in American Urban History. Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath &Co., 1994.

Lecture Guides:
Lecture guides, whose purpose is to facilitate note taking during lecture and studying for exams, will be available approximately one week in advance of lectures for downloading from the web.

Requirements:
There will be a midterm and a final exam, both consisting of three sections: multiple-choice, short answer, and essay. Study questions will be handed out ahead of time. The final exam will cover the period from the midterm on. No makeup exams will be given without a doctor’s excuse. Students will also have to complete one special project, described later in this syllabus.

Grading:
Midterm: 40%
Final: 40%
Special Project:20%

(Choose one; due August 3, 1999: (NO EXCEPTIONS!)

Urban Neighborhood History:

Adopt a City:

History on the Web:

• Oregon Historical Society (http://www.ohs.org/index.html)
• John Reps's Urban Planning, 1794-1918 (http://www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/homepage.htm)
• American Memory from the Library of Congress (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/amhome.html)

Poster Presentation:

Nonfiction Book Review:

Propose a Project:

If you have no background in urban history or are especially interested in Portland:

Abbott, Carl, Portland: Planning, politics, and growth in a twentieth-century city (1983)
Jane Jacobs, Cities and the wealth of nations (1984)
E. Kimbark MacColl, The growth of a city: Power and politics in Portland, Oregon , 1915-1950 (1976)
E. Kimbark MacColl, The shaping of a city: Business and politicsin Portland, Oregon 1885-1915 (1976)
James E. Vance, Jr., This scene of man: The role and structure of the city in the geography of western civilization (1977)
Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The urban wilderness: A history of American city (1972)
Craig Wollner, The city builders: One hundred years of union carpentry in Portland, Oregon (1990)
Craig Wollner, Electrifying Eden: Portland General Electric, 1889-1965(1990)

The following books are divided into rough chronological order (some overlap)

To 1900:
Gunther Barth, City people: The rise of modern city culture in nineteenth century America (1979)
Thomas Bender, Community & social change in America (1978)
Barbara Berg, The remembered gate: Origins of American feminism--The woman and the city, 1800-1860 (1978)
Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and freedom in the age of the American Revolution (1983)
Henry Binford, The first suburbs: Residential communities on the Boston periphery, 1815-1860 (1985)
Nancy Cott, The bonds of womanhood: 'Women's sphere' in New England,1780-1835 (1971)
Paul Gilje, The road to mobocracy: Popular disorder in New York City, 1763-1834 (1987)
Robert Ernst, Immigrant life in New York City, 1825-1863 (1949)
Joyce Goodfriend, Before the melting pot: Society and culture in colonial New York City, 1664-1730 (1991)
Dolores Hayden, The grand domestic revolution: A history of feminist designs for American homes, neighborhoods. and cities (1981)
Michael B. Katz, Micheal J. Doucet, and Mark J. Stern, The social organization of early industrial capitalism (1982)
Lewis Mumford, Roots of Contemporary American Architecture (1952)
Gary B. Nash, Red, white, and black: The peoples of early America(1982)
Gary B. Nash, The urban crucible: Social change, political consciousness and the origins of the American revolution (1979)
William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The development of an Afro-American subculture in eighteenth century New England (1983)
John Reps, Town planning in frontier America (1969)
Moses Rischin, The promised city: New York's Jews 1870-1914 (1963)
David R. Roediger, The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the American working class (1991)
Alexander Saxton, The rise and fall of the white republic: Class politics and mass culture in nineteenth century America (1990)
Christine Stansell, City of women: The female laboring poor in New York City, 1789-1860 (1986)
Graham Taylor, Satellite cities, a study of industrial suburbs (1915, reprint 1970)
Jon C. Teaford, The unheralded triumph: City government in America,1870-1900 (1984)
Laura Thatcher Ulrich, Good wives: Images and reality in the lives of women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (1982)
Richard C. Wade, The urban frontier: 1790-1830 (1957)
Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar suburbs: The process of change in Boston,1870-1900 (1962)
Shane White, Somewhat more independent: The end of slavery in NewYork City, 1770-1810 (1991)
Sean Wilentz, Chants democratic: New York City and the rise of the American working class (1984)

1900-1920
Jane Addams, Twenty years at Hull House (1910)
Pau Barrett, The automobile and urban transit: The formation of public policy in Chicago, 1900-1930 (1983)
Richard C. Berner, Seattle 1900-1920: From boomtown, urban turbulence, to restoration (1991)
John Bodnar, Roger Simon & Michael P. Weber, Lives of their own: Blacks, Italians. and Poles in Pittsburgh 1870-1940 (1977)
Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialismm, 1870-1920 (1981)
Alexander B. Callow, Jr., The tweed ring (1966)
Charles W. Cheape, Moving the masses: Urban public transit in New York, Boston. and Philadelphia, 1880-1912 (1980)
Michael H. Ebner, Creating Chicago's North Shore: A suburban history(Chicago, 1988)
Michael H. Ebner and Eugene Tobin, eds., The age of urban reform: New perspectives on the Progressive era (1977)
Mathew Edel, Elliot D. Sclar, and Daniel Luria, Shakey palaces: Home ownership and social mobility in Boston's suburbanization (1984)
Robert Fishman, Bourgeois utopias: The rise and fall of suburbia(1987)
Robert Fogelson, The fragmented metropolis: Los Angeles (1977)
Richard E. Fogelsong, Planning the capitalist city: The colonial era to 1920 (1986)
Timothy J. Gilfolyle, City of eros: New York City, prostitution, and the commercialization of sex, 1790-1920 (1992)
John Higham, Strangers in the land: Patterns of American nativism 1860-1925 (1963)
William Issel and Robert Cherny, San Francisco, 1865-1932: Politics, power, and urban development (1986)
Richard W. Judd, Socialist cities: Municipal politics and the grassroots of American Socialism (1989)
Roy Lubove, The Progressive and the slums: Tenement house reform in New York City 1890-1917 (1962)
Eric H. Monkkonen, Police in urban America, 1860-1920 (1981)
Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The making of a ghetto; Negro New York, 1890-1930 (1966)
William L. Riordon, Plunkeet of Tammany Hall (1963)
Mel Scott, American city planning since 1890 (1971)
Alan Spear, Black Chicago: The making of a Negro ghetto (1967)
Joel Tarr, Transportation innovation and changing spatial patterns: Pittsburgh, 1850-1910 (1972)
William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful movement (1989)
Gwendolyn Wright, Building the dream: A social history of housing in America (1981)

1920-1940
Joseph Barton, Peasants and strangers: Italians, Romanians, and Slovaksin an American city, 1900-1950 (1975)
Ronald H. Bayor, Neighbors in conflict: The Irish, Germans, Jews, and Italians of New York City, 1929-1941 (1979)
Susan P. Benson, Counter cultures: Saleswomen, managers, and customers in American department stores, 1890-1940 (1986)
M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the rationale city: The myth of American city planning (1983)
Robert A. Caro, The power broker: Robert Moses and the fall of New York (1974)
Galen Cranz, The politics of park design: A history of urban parks in America (1982)
Ronald Edsforth, Class conflict and cultural consensus: The making of a mass consumer society in Flint, Michigan (1987)
Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin' out: New York nightlife and the transformation of American culture (1981)
Mark Foster, From streetcar to superhighway: American city planners and urban transportation, 1900-1940 (1981)
Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku KIux Klan in the city, 1915-1930 (1967)
Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass frontier: Surburbanization of the United States (1985)
Ira Katznelson, City trenches: Urban politics and the patterning of class in the United States (1981)
Joanne Meyerowitz, Women adrift: Independent wage earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (1988)
William D. Miller, Harsh and dreadful love: Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement (1973)
William H. Mullins, The Depression and the urban West Coast, 1920-1933: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland (1991)
Harold L. Platt, The electric city: Energy and the growth of the Chicago area, 1880-1930 (1991)
Judith E. Smith, Family connections: A history of Italian and Jewish immigrant lives in Providence, Rhode Island, 1900-1940 (1985)
John Stack, International conflict in an American city: Boston's Irish, Italians and Jews, 1935-1944 (1970)
Clarence Stein, Toward New Towns for America (1957)
Sam Bass Warner, The private city. Philadelphia in three periods of its growth (Revised ed., 1987)

1940 to the present
Carl Abbott, The new urban America: Growth and politics in sunbelt cities (1981)
Michael Bernick, Urban Illusions: New approaches to inner city unemployment(1987)
John C. Bollens & Henry J. Schmandt, The Metropolis: People, politics, and economic life (4th ed., 1982)
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More work for mother: The ironies of household technology from the open hearth to the microwave (1983)
Roger Daniels, Asian Americans: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850 (1988)
Mike Davis, City of quartz: Excavating the future in Los Angeles(1990)
John D'Emilio, Sexual politics, sexual communities: The making of a homosexual subculture in the United States, 1945-1970 (1983)
Bernard J. Frieden & Lynne B. Sagalyn, Downtown. Inc.: How America builds cities (1990)
Susan S. Fainstein, Norman I. Fainstein, Richard Child Hill, Dennis R. Judd, and Michael Peter Smith, Restructuring the city (1986)
Robert Fisher, Let the people decide: Neighborhood organizing in America (1984)
Robert Fogelson, Violence as protest: A study of riots and ghettos(1971)
Joel Garreau, Edge city: Life on the new frontier (1991)
Mark I. Gelfand, A nation of cities: the federal government and urban America, 1933-1965 (1975)
Paul & Percival Goodman, Communitas: Means of livelihood and ways of life (1947)
Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States(1962)
Dolores Hayden, Redesigning the American dream: The future of housing work and family life (1984)
John Herbers, The new heartland: America's flight beyond the suburbs and how it is changing our future (1988)
Ruth Horowitz, Honor and the American dream: Culture and identity in a Chicano community (1983)
Jane Jacobs, The death and life of great American cities (1961)
Ira Katznelson, City trenches: Urban politics and the patterning of class conflict (1981)
John Mollenkpf, The contested city (1983)
Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor people's movements: Why they succeed and how they fail (1979)
Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the poor: The function of public welfare (1971)
Elizabeth H. Pleck, Black migration and poverty in Boston (1979)
Roger Lotchin, ed., The martial metropolis: American cities in war and peace (1984)
Vicki L. Ruiz, Cannery women, canner lives: Mexican women, unionization, and the California food procedding industry, 1930-1950 (1987)
Mark Rose, Interstate: Express highway politics 1941-1956
Allen J. Scott, Metropolis: From the division of labor to urban form (1986)
Neil Smith & Peter Williams, Gentrification of the city(1986)
Jon C. Teaford, City and suburb: The political fragmentation of modern America 1850-1970 (1979)
Jon C. Teaford, The rough road to renaissance: Urban revitalization in America, 1940-1985 (1990)
Stephen Thernstrom, The other Bostonians: Poverty and progress in an American metropolis, 1880-1970 (1970)
Seymour Toll, Zoned America (1969)

Plagiarism is a very serious offense.  However, many university students do not know what it is or do not realize that they are committing plagiarism when, in fact, they are.  Please read the paragraph below, defining plagiarism.  If you have any questions at all about whether something consitutes plagiarism, contact me immediately.

Plagiarism is the representation of the words or ideas of another as one's own in any academic exercise. To avoid plagiarism,…every direct quotation must be identified by quotation marks or by appropriate indentation and must be promptly cited in the text or in a footnote. Acknowledgment is required when material from another source is stored in print, electronic, or other medium…and is paraphrased or summarized in whole or in part in one's own words. To acknowledge a paraphrase properly, one might…state: "to paraphrase Plato's comment..."; and conclude with a footnote identifying the exact reference. A footnote…acknowledging only a directly quoted statement does not suffice to notify the reader of any preceding or succeeding…paraphrased material. Information which is common knowledge, such as names of leaders of prominent nations, basic scientific laws, etc., need not be footnoted; however, all facts or information obtained in reading or research that are not common…knowledge among students in the course must be acknowledged. In addition to materials specifically cited in the text, only…materials that contribute to one's general understanding of the subject may be acknowledged in the bibliography. Plagiarism can, in some cases, be a subtle issue. Any questions about what constitutes plagiarism should be discussed with the faculty member (Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey Campus, Policy for Academic Integrity for Undergraduate and Graduate Students, p. 3D, accessed September 22, 1997 at [http://history.rutgers.edu/undergraduate/courses/plag.htm].

Be aware that documents downloaded from the Internet should be treated with the same respect as any other source in terms of plagiarism. Any use of Internet sources is subject to proper citation procedures.