- Books ordered for the bookstores:
- Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class (Cambridge, 1979)
- Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Temple, 1986)
- William R. Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham (Oxford, 1992) [check for used copies, Library reserve]
- Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (Hill & Wang, 1992)
- Robert A. Beauregard and Sophie Body-Gendrot, eds., The Urban Moment: Cosmopolitan Essays on the Late 20th Century City (Sage, 1999)
- Recommended:
- Jeremy Seabrook, In the Cities of the South (Verso, 1996) [check for used copies; Library reserve]
- Other reading (marked with * in the syllabus) is on Library reserve.
Syllabus
I. Locating the City in American Culture
W, 5/31 "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" (55 mins.)
R, 6/1 "The City" (1939; 45 mins.)
- All read:
- *Warren Susman, "The City in American Culture," in his Culture as History (Pantheon, 1984), 237-251
- *Neil Harris, "Four Stages of Cultural Growth: The American City," in his Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago, 1990), Ch. 1, 12-28
- *Harvey J. Graff, "The City, Crisis, and Change in American Culture," in Transitions to the 21st Century, ed. Norman Glickman and Donald Hicks (JAI Press, 1983), 113-152
- *Sam Bass Warner, Jr., "The Management of Multiple Urban Images," in The Pursuit of Urban History, ed. Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe (Edward Arnold, 1983), 383-394
- *Daniel Calhoun, "The City as Teacher," History of Education Quarterly, 9 (1969), 312-325
- *Rec: Anthony D. King, ed., Representing the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st Century City (New York University Press, 1996), Part III
- Locating the City: Further Reading
- Michel de Certeau, Ch. VII "Walking in the City" and Ch.IX "Spatial Stories," in his The Practice of Everyday Life (California, 1984), 91-110, 115-130
- *Kathleen D. McCarthy, "Creating the American Athens: Cities, Cultural Institutions, and the Arts, 1840-1930," American Quarterly, 37 (1985), 426-439
- *Timothy J. Gilfoyle, "White Cities, Linguistic Turns, and Disneylands: The New Paradigms of Urban History," Reviews in American History, 26 (1998) 175-204
- Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (Johns Hopkins, 1978)
- Ira Katznelson, Marxism and the City (Oxford, 1992)
- David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Johns Hopkins, 1989)
- Anthony D. King, ed., Representing the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st Century City (New York University Press, 1996)
- James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (Minnesota, 1999)
- Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe, eds., The Pursuit of Urban History (Arnold, 1983)
- Paul Hohenberg and Lynn Lees, The Making of Urban Europe (Harvard, 1996)
- Charles Tilly, ed., Cities and the Rise of States (Blackwell)
II. Searching for Urban Cultures - Nineteenth-Century America
M, 6/5 "The Five Points" (American Social History Project, 28 mins.)
T, 6/6 "1877" (28 mins.)
W, 6/7 Library research session
R, 6/8 "Coney Island" (American Experience; 60 mins.)
- All read:
- *Thomas Bender, "The Culture of Intellectual Life," and "The Erosion of Public Culture," in his Intellect and Public Life (Johns Hopkins, 1993), 3-15 and 30-46
- *Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class (Cambridge, 1979), chs. 4 & 5
- *Christine Stansell, "Women, Children, and the Uses of the Streets," Feminist Studies, 8 (1982), 309-335
- *John Kasson, "Civility and Rudeness: Urban Etiquette and the Bourgeois Social Order in Nineteenth-Century America," Prospects, 9 (1984), 143-167
- *David Scobey, "Anatomy of the Promenade: The Politics of Bourgeois Sociability in Nineteenth-Century New York," Social History, 17 (1992), 203-227
- Searching for Urban Cultures--Nineteenth-Century America: Further Reading
- Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision (Kentucky, 1975; Johns Hopkins, 1991)
- _____, Metropolitan Intellect (Knopf, 19 )
- Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (Cambridge UP, 1989)
- Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class (Cambridge, 1979)
- _____, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City During the Nineteenth Century (California, 1997)
- Richard Stott, Workers in the Metropolis (Cornell, 1990)
- Michael B. Katz, Michael Doucet, and Mark Stern, The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Harvard, 1983)
- David Ward, Poverty, Ethnicity, and the American City, 1840-1925: Changing Conceptions of the Slum and the Ghetto (Cambridge, 1989)
- Christopher Den Tandt, The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism (Illinois, 1998)
- Neil Harris, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago, 1990)
- David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (Columbia, 1998)
- Helen Horowitz, Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago, 1880s to 1917 (Kentucky, 1976)
- Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Harvard, 1988)
- John Kasson, Rudeness and Civility (Hill & Wang, 1990)
- _____, Amusing the Million (Penguin, 1978)
- Wyn Kelley, Melville’s City: Literacy and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (Cambridge, 1996)
- Kevin McNamara, Urban Verbs: Arts and Discourses of American Cities (Stanford, 1996)
- Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A His tory of Central Park (Cornell, 1992)
- Hana Wirth-Nesher, City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel (Cambridge, 1996)
- Mary Ryan, "Gender and Public Access: Women's Politics in Nineteenth-Century America," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (MIT Press, 1992), 259-288
- Mary Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Johns Hopkins, 1990)
- Sarah Deutsch, "Reconceiving the City: Women, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1910," Gender and History, 6, 2 (August, 1994), 202-223
- Elizabeth Wilson, "The Invisible Flaneur," New Left Review, no. 191 (1992), 90-110
- Hazel V. Carby, "Policing the Black Woman's Body in an Urban Culture," Critical Inquiry 18 (1992), 738-755
- Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex (Norton, 1992)
- Kathleen D. McCarthy, Women's Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830-1930 (Chicago, 1991
- Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (California, 1992)
- Philip J. Ethington, "Recasting Urban Political History: Gender, the Public, the Household, and Political Participation in Boston and San Francisco during the Progressive Era," Social Science History 16 (1992), 301-333
- Andrea Kornbluh, "City Sex: Views of American Women and Urban Culture, 1869 to 1890," Urban History Yearbook, 18 (1991), 60-83
- Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (California, 1993)
- Richard Dennis, English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge)
- H.J. Dyos, Victorian Suburb (Leicester, 1973)
- H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, eds., The Victorian City 2 vols (Routledge, 1973)
- Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in Europe and America, 1920-1940 (Columbia, 1985)
- Lynn Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in London (Cornell)
- John Merriman, The Margins of Urban Life (Oxford)
- _____, ed., French Cities in the Nineteenth Century
- Donald Olsen, The Growth of Victorian London (Penguin, 1979)
- Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure (Princeton, 1999)
- Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Oxford, 1972)
- Anthony Sutcliffe, Paris: An Architectural History (Yale, 1996)
- _____, The Autumn of Central Paris
- Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight (Chicago, 1992)
III. Searching for Urban Cultures - Twentieth-Century America
M, 6/12 "Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl" (28 mins.)
T, 6/13 "Proud Towers" (Pride of Place, 55 mins.)
W, 6/14 Library research
R, 6/15 "Suburbs: Arcadia for Everyone" (Pride of Place, 55 mins.)
- All read:
- *Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Temple, 1986)
- *William R. Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and Commerce in New York (Oxford UP, 1992), esp. chs. 1, 2, 3
- Select from:
- *Kathleen Conzen, "Immigrants, Immigrant Neighborhoods, and Ethnic Identity," Journal of American History, 66 (1979), 603-614
- *Roy Rosenzweig, "Middle-Class Parks and Working-Class Play," Radical History Review, 21 (1979), 31-48
- *Frank Couvares, "The Triumph of Commerce: Class Culture and Mass Culture in Pittsburgh," in Working-Class America, ed. Michael Frisch and Daniel Walkowitz (Illinois, 1983), 123-152
- *Joe W. Trotter, "African Americans in the City, 1900-1950," Journal of Urban History 21 (1995), 438-457 OR *Kenneth L. Kusmer, "African Americans in the City since World War II," Journal of Urban History 21 (1995), 458-504
- *William Leach, "Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890-1925," Journal of American History, 71 (1984), 319-342
- *Lisabeth Cohen, "Encountering Mass Culture at the Grassroots: The Experience of Chicago Workers in the 1920s," American Quarterly, 41 (1989), 6-33
- *Michael Ebner, "Re-Reading Suburban America," American Quarterly, 37 (1985), 368-381 OR
- *Carol O'Connor, "Sorting Out the Suburbs: Patterns of Land Use, Class, and Culture," American Quarterly, 37 (1985), 382-394
- Searching for Urban Cultures--Twentieth-Century America: Further Reading
- John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigration in Urban America (Indiana, 1985)
- Kathleen N. Conzen, et al, "The Invention of Ethnicity," Journal of American Ethnic History, 12 (1992), 3-63
- Olivier Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality . . . Detroit (Chicago, 1982)
- Donna Gabaccia, From Sicily to Elizabeth Street (Albany, 1984)
- David Gerber, The Making of American Pluralism . . . Buffalo (Urbana, 1989)
- Kenneth Goings and Raymond A. Mohl, es., The New African American Urban History (Sage, 1996)
- James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, 1989)
- Joe W. Trotter, ed., The Great Migration in Comparative Perspective (Indiana, 1991)
- James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington, D.C. (Illinois, 1980)
- Kenneth Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape (Illinois, 1976)
- Elizabeth Pleck, Black Migration and Poverty (Academic, 1979)
- Joe W. Trotter, Black Milwaukee (Illinois, 1985)
- Alan Spear, Black Chicago (Chicago, 1967)
- Thomas Philpot, The Slum and the Ghetto (Oxford, 1978)
- Nathan Huggins, The Harlem Renaissance (1971)
- David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (Vintage, 1981)
- George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American (Oxford, 1993)
- Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society (Harvard, 1979)
- Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio (California, 1982)
- Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles (Texas, 1983)
- Elaine Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (Oxford, 1989)
- Susan Porter Benson, "Palace of Consumption and Machine for Selling," Radical History Review, 21 (1979), 199-221
- Jackson Lears, "From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930," in The Culture of Consumption, ed. Richard W. Fox and Lears (Pantheon, 1983), 1-38
- William R. Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and Commerce in New York (Oxford UP, 1992)
- William R. Taylor, ed., Inventing Times Square (Russell Sage, 1991), esp. Richard W. Fox, "The Discipline of Amusement," 83-98; Jean-Christophe Agnew, "Times Square: Secularization and Sacralization," 2-13; and selections from Pts II, III, IV
- William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (Pantheon, 1993)
- Simon Bronner, ed., Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880-1920 (Norton, 1989)
- Robert Snyder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York, 1880-1930 (Oxford UP, 1990)
- Lewis Ehrenberg, Steppin' Out (Greenwood, 1981)
- Lary May, Screening Out the Past (Oxford UP, 1980)
- John Kasson, Amusing the Million (Hill & Wang, 1978)
- David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (Basic, 1993)
- Margaret Marsh, Suburban Lives (Rutgers, 1990)
- Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Streetcar Suburbs (Harvard, 1962)
- Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (Oxford, 1985)
- Henry Binford, The First Suburbs (Chicago, 1984)
- Carol O'Connor, A Sort of Utopia (SUNY, 1984)
- Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias (Basic, 1987)
- Clifford Clark Jr., The American Family Home (North Carolina, 1986)
- Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model Home (Chicago, 1980)
- Barbara Kelly, Expanding the American Dream. . . Levittown (SUNY, 1993)
- Herbert Gans, "Urbanism and Suburbanism as Ways of Life," in American Urban History, ed. A.B. Callow (Oxford, 1973, 2nd ed.), 507-521
- Classic works: Herbert Gans, Robert Woods, Bennett Berger, John Seeley
- Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna (Oxford)
- Temma Kaplan, Red City, Blue Period (California)
- Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in Europe and America, 1920-1940 (Columbia, 1985)
- Anthony Sutcliffe, Paris: An Architectural History (Yale, 1996)
- _____, The Autumn of Central Paris
- _____, ed., Metropolis, 1890-1940 (Chicago, 1984)
IV-V. Urban Cultures Today and Tomorrow: Beyond Private v. Public?
M, 6/19 "Going to Chicago" (70 mins.)
T, 6/20 Research/Consultation
W, 6/21 "Mission Hill and the Miracle of Boston" (60 mins.)
R, 6/22 Research/Consultation
- All read:
- *Robert Beauregard and Sophie Body-Genrot, eds., The Urban Moment (Sage, 1999), selections
- *Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space(Hill & Wang, 1992), selections
- *Sharon Zukin, "The Hollow Center: U.S. Cities in the Global Era," in America at Century's End, ed. Alan Wolfe (California, 1991), 245-261, 526-528
- *Ada Louise Huxtable, "Inventing American Reality," New York Review, 3 Dec. 1992, 24-29
- *Joan Dideon, "New York: Sentimental Journeys," New York Review, 17 Jan. 1991, 45-56
- *William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock, "Bold New City or Built-Up 'Burb? Redefining Contemporary Suburbia," American Quarterly, 46, 1 (March, 1994), 1-30, and responses by Robert Bruegmann, Robert Fishman, Margaret Marsh, June Manning
- Thomas, 31-54, and Response by Sharpe and Wallock, 55-61
- Rec.: *Jeremy Seabrook, In the Cities of the South (Verso, 1996)
- Urban Cultures Today and Tomorrow: Further Reading
- Sam Bass Warner, Jr., "The Public Invasion of Private Space and. . . ," in Growth and Transformation of the Modern City (Stockholm: Swed ish Council for Building, 1979), 171-180
- Nancy Fraser,"Rethinking the Public Sphere," Social Text, 25/26 (1990), 56-80
- William Gass, "The Face of the City," Harpers, March, 1986, 37-46
- AHR Forum, "Shopping Malls in America," with Lisabeth Cohen, Thomas Hanchett, and Kenneth Jackson, American Historical Review, 101, 4 (Oct., 1996), 1050-1121
- Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power (California, 1991)
- _____, The Cultures of Cities (Blackwell, 1995)
- Carl Abbott, The New Urban America (North Carolina, 1987)
- _____, The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West (Arizona, 1987)
- John Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture (California, 1992)
- Deborah Dash Moore, To the Golden Cities (Free Press, 1994)
- "Public Space: Urbanity, Streets, Costs," Dissent, Fall, 1986, 470-494
- "Whatever Became of the Public Square," Harpers, July, 1990, 49-60
- Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (MIT)
- Gerald Frug, City Making: Building Communities Without Building Walls (Princeton, 1999)
- Mike Davis, City of Quartz. . . Los Angeles (Verso, 1990)
- _____, Ecology of Fear (Metropolitan, 1998)
- Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies (Verso, 1989)
- A. Portes and A. Stepick, City on the Edge. . . Miami (California, 1993)
- David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Blackwell, 1989)
- Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (Routledge, 1996)
- James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (Minnesota, 1999)
- Anthony D. King, ed., Re-Presenting the City (NYU, 1996)
- Rob Kling, Spencer Olin, and Mark Poster, eds., Postsuburban California (California, 1991)
- Charles Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta (Verso, 1996)
- Michael Dear, ed., Rethinking Los Angeles (Sage, 1997)
- Nan Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism (Blackwell, 1996)
- On Global Cities, see especially the work of Saskia Sassen and Janet Abu-Lugod
- Peter Marcuse and Ronald Van Kemper, eds., Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? (Blackwell, 2000)
- Michael Peter Smith and Joe R. Feagin, eds., The Capitalist City (1987)
M, 6/26 "Style Wars" (69 mins.) Research/Consultation
T, 6/27 Research/Consultation
W, 6/28 Presentation of research proposals
R, 6/29 Presentation of research proposals
M, 7/3 Presentation of research proposals/Proposals Due
[no proposals will be accepted late unless permission is received in advance or very unusual circumstances arise]
* Library reserve reading
Research Proposals
The major written requirement for this course is a formal proposal for a research project. Proposals should be no longer than eight to ten (8-10) double-spaced, typewritten pages, and no shorter than about six (6) pages. Your topic should fall within the general scope (broadly defined) of urban studies. Although you may not actually conduct all the research you propose, draft the paper, or otherwise complete the project, preparing a formal research proposal still provides a valuable experience in your academic training, one useful and applicable to many other scholastic or nonacademic tasks.
For this assignment, you will propose formally the research for a paper of, say, 25-30 pages or an M.A. thesis. Proposals take a variety of general forms, formats, and organizations. Nevertheless, all research proposals address these key concerns:
- defining the research problem or subject;
- discussing briefly the intellectual context of the subject or background to the research proposed--often in the form of a "literature search" and/or a comment on previous studies and approaches to the subject;
- explaining your own distinctive approach or research strategy, with specific attention to your assumptions and use of specific theorical and critical approaches, your questions and/or hypothesis(es), the ways in which your research can be distinguished from that of other researchers;
- the sources that you anticipate using, and a sense of the problems they will present to you and their special usefulness for understanding the subject and answering the questions you propose;
- the methods you expect to employ to probe those sources; and
- the anticipated results or outcome (say, on the one hand, what you hope to learn and the contribution you might make, and, on the other hand, the kind of paper or project you might use to present the results to a larger audience, including, for example, an M.A. supervising committee).
The proposal should include a bibliography of both primary and secondary sources. This will help to establish the practicability or do-ability of your project. Present the bibliography in proper and full bibliographic form, divided (in terms of the usual definitions) into primary and secondary works. Identify library locations and, where possible, library call numbers. With the help of UTSA and other reference librarians, use card and electronic catalogues, print and electronic databases and bibliographies. When relevant, explore the usefulness of specific nonprint sources. Use course readings and bibliographies as points of origin and landmarks. If the relevance and usefulness of a specific item is not readily apparent, indicate in a few words what you take as its usefulness. In other words, avoid any signs of padding. As you conduct your own research, be alert for items that might be useful to your colleagues in the class. That, too, is an important part of academic labor.
The instructor, within the limits of his knowledge and imagination should be considered one of your resources; so, too, are your other professors and your peers in the program. We will discuss your work toward proposals, as possible, in class and provide some time for progress reports and raising general questions.
Note: All written work for this course should be conducted with gender-neutral, nonsexist language and rhetorical constructions. It is my strong preference that class discussion and oral reports also be gender-neutral and nonsexist. This is part of a seminar situation in which full respect and opportunity are accorded by and to all participants by all others. The collegial relationships begun in the classroom should accompany our relevant relationships with each other elsewhere as well.
Written work should be turned in without cover pages or special folders. Simply put your name and course identification on the top of the first page and staple in upper left corner. If you use a dot-matrix printer, please ensure that the ribbon is new and of good quality; papers with faint or blurry print will not be read. You may use any system for annotation, foot- or endnotes, bibliography, and the like, that you know or prefer, provided that it is one accepted within the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities, and that you use it correctly and consistently. Most common, of course, are University of Chicago/Turabian and MLA. Various style sheets and guidebooks are sold in the campus bookstore and most other bookstores.
No written work will be accepted late unless very unusual circumstances arise or permission is granted in advance of the time the paper is due.
Please provide a stamped, self-addressed envelope so your research proposals can be returned to you after the semester.
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