The City in History: The Culture of Cities
(HIS 6193)

Harvey J. Graff
hgraff@utsa.edu
University of Texas
San Antonio, Texas, USA

Spring 2002

SYLLABUS
Introduction | Requirements | Class Schedule and Assignments | Research Proposals
Professor's Comments

Office Hours
Building HSS 4.04.20 on Tues., Thurs. at 3-4:00 p.m. and by appointment; and
Building HSS 3.02.52 on Thurs. at 5:30-8:15 p.m.
Phone:  (210) 458-7353

INTRODUCTION
With a focus on places we call "urban," from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, in North America but with a comparative western perspective, the course explores the complicated development of what we often but uncritically call "modern culture." In seminar format, together we investigate the social, economic, cultural, and political processes that shape urbanization and urbanism, and the human responses to them. We also consider alternative approaches to studying and interpreting them.

Specifically, we consider the transformation of urban space and place during the critical eras from the eighteenth century to the present in which commercial capitalism, industrialization, and massive human migration remade basic social and cultural relationships. Among the key factors we investigate are social class, gender, race and ethnicity, geographic and sociocultural space, production and consumption, accumulation and cultural display, institutions, architecture, planning, technology, and communications. Questions about the "private" and the "public," separate spheres, cultural hierarchies, class and mass culture, integration and segregation/fragmentation, freedom and control, and the uses of space to solve society's problems help to shape our discussions.

In the process, we critically probe the meanings of both "urban" and "culture" in concrete social and political economic contexts and in various theories, and the futures of cities. We consider alternative formulations and relationships as we search for understanding. The course includes an introduction to several approaches to and different uses of historical comparisons and comparative methods. Our realm is the historical; our questions, tools, and theories are interdisciplinary. Our focus is North American but within a comparative perspective and with opportunities to explore non-U.S. topics.

REQUIREMENTS
Regular reading, attendance, and participation in seminar (35%);
5 page essay due at mid-semester (20%); and
a research proposal (45%).

A 5 page essay, due on Week 7 or 8, that compares two items drawn from required course readings. Each paper must include a critical discussion of the nature of the comparison that is attempted, and the explicit uses of comparison (comparative method, theory, or approach) by the authors of the pieces selected and by you in constructing your paper. One of these items might be a film; if so, the special nature of film as historical source and historical narrative will need to be addressed.

A second written assignment, due at last class, is a research proposal for a comparative project in urban history (approximately 10-12 pages). Proposals will place urban questions or issues within an explicitly comparative perspective defined in the proposal. Use either or both the articles on comparative history or comparative urban history for guidance. See Research Proposals below for specific information and suggestions.

For both papers, the readings in the syllabus on comparative history and comparative urban history are especially valuable and should be used explicitly and carefully.

Required Books ordered for the bookstores
Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision (Johns Hopkins, 1991 [1975])
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)
[OP--check for used copies, Library reserve]
Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power (California, 1991)

Recommended Texts
Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992)
Neil Harris, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago, 1990)
"Women and the City," Journal of Urban History, 23, 3 (March 1997) Sage Pubs.
"North American Cities and Suburbs," Journal of Urban History, 27, 3 (March 2001) Sage Pubs.
Kenneth Goings and Raymond A. Mohl, eds., The New African American Urban History (Sage, 1996): republication of "The New African American Urban History 1 & 2," Journal of Urban History, 21, 3 (March & May 1995)
Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston (Harvard, 1962)
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)
Anthony D. King, ed., Representing the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st Century City (New York University Press, 1996), Part III

Other reading (marked with * in the syllabus) is on Library reserve.

Turning in Assignments
All work that is turned in for evaluation or grading should be typed, usually double-spaced, with margins of 1-1 ½ inches on all sides; printed in 11 or 12 point font, in a legible type face. Be sure that your printer ribbon or toner allows you to produce clear copies. Follow page or word limits and meet deadlines. Follow any specific assignment requirements (formatting or endnotes or bibliography, for example). Your writing should be gender neutral as well as clear and to the point. If you have a problem, see me, if at all possible, in advance of due dates. Unacceptable work will be returned, ungraded, to you. There will be penalties for work submitted late without excuse.

Civility
Mutual respect and cooperation, during the time we spend together each week and the time you work on group assignments, are the basis for successful conduct of this course. The class is a learning community that depends on respect, cooperation, and communication among all of us. This includes coming to class on time, prepared for each day's work: reading and assignments complete, focusing on primary classroom activity, and participating. It also includes polite and respectful expression of agreement or disagreement-with support for your point of view and arguments--with other students and with the professor. It does not include arriving late or leaving early, or behavior or talking that distracts other students. Please turn off all telephones, beepers, etc.

Academic Honesty
Scholastic honesty is expected and required. It is a major part of university life, and contributes to the value of your university degree. All work submitted for this class must be your own. Copying or representing the work of anyone else (in print or from another student) is plagiarism and cheating. This is unacceptable in this class and also prohibited by the University. Information on scholastic dishonesty, including plagiarism, is provided in the Student Code of Conduct, Section 203 "Scholastic Dishonesty." When in doubt, consult the instructor.

Disabilities
To receive support services, students with disabilities must register with the Office of Disability Services (MS 2.03.18; 458-4157-voice; 458-4981-TTY)

 

Culture of Cities
CLASS SCHEDULE AND ASSIGNMENTS

Readings marked with an asterisk (*) are on Library reserve.
Special issues of journals, designated with
"[Sample]", are meant to be reviewed, reading what interests you and as your time allows.

I.   Locating the City in American Culture
1.   Introduction
(Jan. 17)

Film:  "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" (55 mins.)


2.   Searching for Cities in American Culture
(Jan. 24)

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, eds. 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, eds. Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe (Edward Arnold, 1983), 383-394
*Daniel Calhoun, "The City as Teacher," History of Education Quarterly, 9 (1969), 312-325
*Recommended: Kathleen Conzen, "Community Studies, Urban History, and American Local History," in The Past Before Us, ed. Michael Kammen (Cornell, 1980), 270-291
*Recommended: Anthony D. King, ed., Representing the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st Century City (New York University Press, 1996), Part III

Film:  "The City" (1939; 45 mins.)

Comparing Histories
All read:
*Grew, Raymond, "The Case for Comparing Histories," American Historical Review, 85 (1980), 763-78
*William H Sewell Jr., “Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History,” History & Theory 6 (1967), 208-218

More on Comparative History
*Bloch, Marc, "Toward a Comparative History of European Societies." in Enterprise and Secular Change. Readings in Economic History, eds. Frederic Lane and Jelle C. (Homewood, IL: R. D. Irwin, 1953)
Riemersma, (Richard Irwin, 1953 [1928]), 494-521
*Alette Olin Hill and Boyd H. Hill, Jr., "Marc Bloch and Comparative History," American Historical Review, 85 (1980), 823 -57
*Victoria E. Bonnell, "The uses of theory, concepts and comparison in historical sociology," Comparative Studies in Society and History 22, 2 (April 1980): 155-173
*Theda Skocpol, "Emerging agendas and recurrent strategies in historical sociology," in T. Skocpol ed., Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (Cambridge, 1984), 365-391
*Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers, "The uses of comparative history in macrosocial inquiry," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 22, 2 (April 1980): 174-197
*Reinhardt Bendix, "The Comparative Analysis of Historical Change," in Social Theory and Economic Change, eds. T. Burns and S. B. Saul, 67-86
*Smelser, Neil J., Comparative Methods in the Social Sciences (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976)

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
Leo Marx, “The Puzzle of Antiurbanism in Classic American Literature,” in Cities of the Mind: Images and Themes of the City in the Social Sciences, eds. Lloyd Rodwin and Robert Hollister (Plenum, 1984), 163-180
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)

Comparisons
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)
Mark Girouard, Cities & People (Yale, 1985)
Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone (Norton)


II.   Making Urban Cultures
Nineteenth-Century America
3.   Urban Visions
(Jan. 31)

All read:
*Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision (Kentucky, 1975; Johns Hopkins, 1991)
*Mary P. Ryan, “Civil Society as Democratic Practice: North American Cities during the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 29 (1999), 559-584

[Optional film: “Daughters of Free Men” (American Social History Project, 28 mins.)]

For Further Reading
Thomas Bender, New York Intellect (Knopf, 1987)
_____, Community and Social Change in America (Rutgers, 1978; Johns Hopkins, 1982)
Mary Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City During the Nineteenth Century (California, 1997)
Morton White and Lucia White, The Intellectual Versus the City (Oxford, 1977 [1962])
Michael Frisch, Town into City: Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Meaning of Community (Harvard, 1973)
David Schuyler, The New Urban Landscape (Johns Hopkins, 1986)
Carl Smith, Chicago and the American Literary Imagination (Chicago, 1984)
_____, Urban Disorder (Chicago, 1995)
Catherine Cocks, Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States (California, 2001)
Stanley K. Schultz, Constructing Urban America (Temple, 1989)
Joel Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink (Akron, 1996)
Martin Melosi, The Sanitary City (Johns Hopkins, 2000)
_____, Garbage in the Cities (Texas A&M, 1981)
Christine Rosen, The Limits of Power: Great Fires and the Process of City Growth in America (Cambridge, 1986)
Harold Platt, The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area, 1880-1930 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991)
Mark Rose, Cities of Light and Heat (Penn State, 1995)
Charles Cheape, Moving the Masses (Harvard 1980)

Comparisons
Donald J. Olsen, The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna (Yale, 1986)
Richard Sennett, The Fall of Urban Man (Cambridge, 1977)
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford, 1973)
Andrew Lees, The City Perceived (Columbia, 1985)
Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (Harcourt, Brace, 1937)
Lloyd Rodwin and Robert M. Hollister, eds., Cities of the Mind (Plenum, 1984)
Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Blackwell, 1992)
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris as Revolution: Writing the 19th-Century City (California,
1994)
J. Gerald Kennedy, Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity (Yale, 1993)
Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin (Harvard, 1996)


4.  Comparing Cities/Library research session
(Feb. 7)

All read, along with Grew and Sewell from Comparing Histories, Week 2:
*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
*Sam Bass Warner Jr, “If All the World Were Philadelphia: A Scaffolding for Urban History,” American Historical Review, 74 (1968), 26-43
*Theodore Hershberg, “The Future of Urban History,” in The Pursuit of Urban History, eds. Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe (Edward Arnold, 1983), 428-448
*Donald J. Olsen, “The City as a Work of Art,” in The Pursuit of Urban History, eds. Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe (Edward Arnold, 1983), 264-285

Also, note the work of Eric Lampard


5.   Family, Class, Gender, and Urban Culture
(Feb. 14)

All read
*Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class (Cambridge, 1979), esp. chs. 4, 5, conclusion
*Christine Stansell, "Women, Children, and the Uses of the Streets," Feminist Studies, 8 (1982), 309-335
*Mona Domosh, “Those ‘Gorgeous Incongruities’: Polite Politics and Public Space on the Streets of 19th Century New York City,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 88 (1998), 209-226

Film: "The Five Points" (American Social History Project, 28 mins.)

For Further Reading
Michael B. Katz, The People of Hamilton (Harvard 1975)
_____, et. al., The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Harvard, 1982)
Peter D. Hall, The Organization of American Culture (NYU, 1982)
Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millenium (Hill & Wang, 1978)
Ronald Story, The Forging of an Aristocracy (Wesleyan, 1980)
William Pease and Jane Pease, The Web of Progress (Oxford, 1985)
Edward Spann, The New Metropolis (Columbia, 1981)
Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850 (Cornell, 1989)
John Gilkeson, Middle-Class Providence (Princeton, 1986)
Alan Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes (Bucknell, 1985)
Kenneth Scherzer, The Unbounded Community: New York City, 1830-1875 (Duke, 1992)
Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class (Oxford, 1984)
Susan Hirsch, The Roots of the American Working Class (Penn, 1978)
Richard Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation (Illinois, 1986)
Steven Ross, Workers on the Edge ( Columbia, 1985)
John Cumbler, Working-Class Community (Greenwood, 1978)
Alan Dawley, Class and Community (Harvard, 1976)
Paul Faler, Mechanics and Manufacturers (SUNY, 1981)
Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia (Temple, 1980)
Daniel Walkowitz, Worker City/Company Town (Illinois, 1978)
Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society (Knopf, 1976)
Ronald Schultz, The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia Artisans and the Politics of Class, 1720-1830 (Oxford, 1993)
Gary Nash, Forging Freedom: the Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840 (Harvard, 1988)
Karen Haltunen, Confidence Men, Painted Women (Yale, 1982)
Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model Home (Chicago, 1980)
Kathleen McCarthy, Noblesse Oblige (Chicago, 1982)
Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder (Knopf, 1970)
_____, Families Against the City (Harvard, 1970)
Harvey J. Graff, The Literacy Myth (Academic Press, 1979)
_____, Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America (Harvard, 1995)
Susan Davis, Parades and Power (Temple, 1986)
Michael Frisch, Town into City: Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Meaning of Community (Harvard, 1973)
David Schuyler, The New Urban Landscape (Johns Hopkins, 1986)
Carl Smith, Chicago and the American Literary Imagination (Chicago, 1984)
_____, Urban Disorder (Chicago, 1995)
Stanley K. Schultz, Constructing Urban America (Temple, 1989)
Joel Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink (Akron, 1996)
Martin Melosi, The Sanitary City (Johns Hopkins, 2000)
_____, Garbage in the Cities (Texas A&M, 1981)
Christine Rosen, The Limits of Power: Great Fires and the Process of City Growth in America (Cambridge, 1986)
Harold Platt, The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area, 1880-1930 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991)
Mark Rose, Cities of Light and Heat (Penn State, 1995)
Charles Cheape, Moving the Masses (Harvard 1980)
Roger Simon, The City Building Process (American Philosophical Society)
Michael Doucet and John Weaver, Housing the North American City (McGill-Queens, 1991)
Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order (Harvard, 1978)
Michael B. Katz, ed., The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History (Princeton, 1993)
_____, Poverty and Policy in American History (Academic, 1983)
_____, In the Shadow of the Poor House (Basic Books)
Raymond Mohl, Poverty in New York City (Oxford, 1970)
David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum (Little, Brown, 1971)
Gerald Grob, Mental Institutions in America (Free Press, 1973)
Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform (Harvard, 1968)
_____, Class, Bureaucracy and Schools (Praeger, 1975 ed.)
James Saunders, Educating an Urban Minority (Oxford, 1977)
Stanley Schultz, The Culture Factory (Oxford, 1973)
David Tyack, The One Best System (Harvard, 1974)
Carl Kaestle, The Evolution of An Urban School System (Harvard, 1983)
_____, Pillars of the Republic (Hill and Wang, 1983)
Kaestle and Maris Vinovskis, Education and Social Change (Cambridge, 1981)
Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson, Broken Promises (Basic, 1982)
Barbara Brenzel, Daughters of the State (MIT, 1983)
Robert Mennel, Thorns and Thistles (New England, 1973)
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the City (Cornell, 1971)
Barbara Rosenkrantz, Public Health and the State (Harvard, 1973)
Judith Walzer Leavitt, The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform (Princeton)
_____, Typhoid Mary (Beacon, 1996)
David Rosner, A Once Charitable Enterprise: Hospitals and Health Care (Cambridge, 1982)
Roger Lane, Policing the City (Harvard, 1967)
_____, Violent Death in the City (Harvard, 1979)
_____, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia (Harvard, 1986)
Eric Monkkonen, The Dangerous Class (Harvard, 1975)
_____, Police in Urban America (Cambridge, 1980)
John Schneider, Detroit and the Problem of Order (Nebraska, 1980)
Michael Hindus, Prison and Plantation (North Carolina, 1980)
Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots (Oxford, 1989)
Neil Larry Shumsky, The Evolution of Political Protest and the Workingmen's Party of California (Columbus: Ohio State U Press, 1991)
Jed Dannenbaum, Drink and Disorder (Illinois, 1984)
Perry Duis, The Saloon (Illinois, 1983)
Madelon Powers, Faces Along the Bar (Chicago, 1997)

Comparison (& for following weeks)
Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes (Princeton, 1973 [1958])

Studies of English urban middle class formation and cities more generally, by Lenore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Robert J. Morris, Alan Kidd, Martin Daunton, S.G. Checkland, Richard Rodger, Richard Dennis, Geoffrey Crossick, David Cannadine, Anthony Sutcliffe, E.P. Hennock, among many others


6.   Engendering City Cultures
(Feb. 21)

All read:
*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
*Sarah Deutsch, "Reconceiving the City: Women, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1910," Gender and History, 6, 2 (August, 1994), 202-223
*Maureen A. Flanagan, “The City Profitable, the City Livable: Environmental Policy, Gender, and Power in Chicago in the 1910s,” Journal of Urban History 22 (1996), 163-190
*Hazel V. Carby, "Policing the Black Woman's Body in an Urban Culture," Critical Inquiry 18 (1992), 738-755
[Sample] “Women and the City,Journal of Urban History, 23, 3 (March 1997)

For Comparisons
*Judith R. Walkowitz, “Going Public: Shopping, Street Harassment, and Streetwalking in Late Victorian London,” Representations 62 (1998), 1-30
*_____, “The Indian Woman, the Flower Girl, and the Jew: Photojournalism in Edwardian England,” Victorian Studies, 42 (1998-1999), 3-46
*_____, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992), esp. Intro., chs. 1-2
*Dina Copelman, “The Gendered Metropolis: Fin-de-siecle London,” Radical History Review, 60 (1994) 38-56

[Optional Film: “1877” (28 mins.)]

For Further Reading
Mary Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Johns Hopkins, 1990)
_____, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City During the Nineteenth Century (California, 1997)
Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 (Oxford, 2000)
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)
_____, Noblesse Oblige (Chicago, 1982)
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
Barbara Berg, The Remembered Gate (Oxford, 1978)
Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (Knopf, 1977)
Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood (Yale, 1977)
Nancy Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change (Cornell, 1984)
Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 (Norton, 1984)
Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model Home (Chicago, 1980)

Comparisons (& see above)
Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flaneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” Theory, Culture and Society, 2 (1985), 37-46
Elizabeth Wilson, “The Invisible Flaneur,” New Left Review, no. 191 (1992), 90-110
_____, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (California 1992)
Deborah Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Cornell, 1995)
Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton 2000)
Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992)


7.   Cultures in Cities: High, Low, and Middling
(Feb. 28)

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 P. Ryan, “‘A Laudable Pride in the Whole of Us’: City Halls and Civic Materialism,” American Historical Review ,105 (2000), 1131-1170
*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
*Neil Harris, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago, 1990), chs. 3, 5,6

Film: "Coney Island" (American Experience; 60 mins.)

Searching for Urban Cultures--Nineteenth-Century America: Further Reading
Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision (Kentucky, 1975; Johns Hopkins, 1991)
_____, New York Intellect (Knopf, 1987)
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)
_____, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Johns Hopkins, 1990)
_____, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City During the Nineteenth Century (California, 1997)
Catherine Cocks, Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850-1915 (California, 2001)
Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (Oxford, 1986)
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)
Susan Porter Benson, Counter Culture (Illinois, 1986)
Gunther Barth, City People (Oxford, 1980)
Helen Horowitz, Culture and the City (Kentucky, 1976)
Douglas Sloan, “Science in New York City, 1867-1907,” Isis, 1 (1980), 35-76
Helen Horowitz, “Animal and Man in the New York Zoological Park,” New York History, 56 (1975), 426-455
Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model Home (Chicago, 1980)
Kathleen McCarthy, Noblesse Oblige (Chicago, 1982)
Burton Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism (Norton, 1976)
E. Digby Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen (Free Press, 1958)
Philip Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco (Cambridge, 1994)
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)
____, The Artist in American Society (Braziller, 1966)
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 History of Central Park (Cornell, 1992)
Hana Wirth-Nesher, City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel (Cambridge, 1996)

Comparisons (& see above)
Camilla Townsend, Tales of Two Cities: Race and Economic Culture in Early Republic North and South America (Texas, 2000)
Matthew Gallman, Receiving Erin’s Children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish Famine Migration (North Carolina, 2000)
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: Explorations on the French Urban Frontier, 1815-1851 (NY: Oxford U Press, 1991)
_____, ed., French Cities in the Nineteenth Century (NY: Holmes & Meier, 1981)
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: The Defeat of Town Planning, 1850-1970 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's U Press, 1971)
Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight (Chicago, 1992)

Five page paper due: Week 7 or 8



III.   Remaking Urban Cultures
Late-Twentieth-Century America
8.  Immigrants & Migrants: Race, Ethnicity, Class, Gender, and Cities I
(Mar. 7)

All read:
*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, eds. Michael Frisch and Daniel Walkowitz (Illinois, 1983), 123-152
*Theodore Hershberg, Alan N. Burstein, Eugene P. Erickson, Stephanie Greenberg, and William L Yancey, “A Tale of Three Cities: Blacks and Immigrants in Philadelphia, 1850-1880, 1930, and 1970,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 441 (Jan. 1979), 65-81
*John Bodnar, Michael Weber, and Roger Simon, “Migration, Kinship, and Urban Adjustment: Blacks and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900-1930,” Journal of American History 66 (1979), 548-565
*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
[Sample] “The New African American Urban History 1 & 2,” Journal of Urban History, 21, 3 (March & May 1995)

Film: “Going to Chicago” (70 mins.)

Comparing Cities & Immigrants
*Theodore Hershberg, Alan N. Burstein, Eugene P. Erickson, Stephanie Greenberg, and William L Yancey, “A Tale of Three Cities: Blacks and Immigants in Philadelphia, 1850-1880, 1930, and 1970,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 441 (Jan. 1979), 65-81
*Kathleen Conzen, "Immigrants, Immigrant Neighborhoods, and Ethnic Identity," Journal of American History, 66 (1979), 603-614
*John Bodnar, Michael Weber, and Roger Simon, “Migration, Kinship, and Urban Adjustment: Blacks and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900-1930,” Journal of American History,
66 (1979), 548-565
*Samuel L. Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of Promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City (Cornell UP, 1999)
*Lynn Lees, “Mid-Victorian Migration and the Irish Family Economy,” Victorian Studies 20 (1976), 25-44
*______ and John Modell, “The Irish Countryman Urbanized,” Journal of Urban History, 3 (1977), 391-408


9.   Immigrants & Migrants: Race, Ethnicity, Class, Gender, and Cities II
(Mar. 21)

All read:
*Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Temple, 1986)
*Susan Porter Benson, "Palace of Consumption and Machine for Selling," Radical History Review, 21 (1979), 199-221
*Lisabeth Cohen, "Encountering Mass Culture at the Grassroots: The Experience of Chicago Workers in the 1920s," American Quarterly, 41 (1989), 6-33

Film: “Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl” (American Social History Project, 28 mins.)

Comparing Victorian Cities
*David Ward, “Victorian Cities: How Modern?” Journal of Historical Geography, 1 (1975), 135-151
*_____, “The Early Victorian City in England and America: On the Parallel Development of an Urban Image,” in European Settlement in North America, ed. James R. Gibson (Toronto, 1978)
*David Cannadine, “Victorian Cities: How Different?” Social History, 4 (1977), 457-482
*_____, “Urban Development in England and America in the Nineteenth Century: Some Comparison and Contrasts,” Economic History Review, 33 (1980), 309-325

Further Reading
Daniel Pope, The Making of American Advertising (Basic, 1983)
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (California, 1984)
Lary May, Screening Out the Past (Oxford, 1980)
Lewis Erenberg, Steppin’ Out (Greenwood, 1981)
John Kasson, Amusing the Million (Hill and Wang, 1978)
Susan Porter Benson, Counter Culture (Illinois, 1986)
Gunther Barth, City People (Oxford, 1980)
Helen Horowitz, Culture and the City (Kentucky, 1976)
Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model Home (Chicago, 1980)
Kathleen McCarthy, Noblesse Oblige (Chicago, 1982)
Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure (Columbia, 1999)
Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars (Monthly Review Press, 1985)
Joanne Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Chicago, 1988)
George Chauncey, Gay New York (Basic, 1994)

Workers and Immigrants
David Ward, Cities and Immigrants (Oxford, 1971)
_____, Poverty, Ethnicity, and the American City, 1840-1925: Changing Conceptions of the Slum and the Ghetto (Cambridge, 1989)
John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigration in Urban America (Indiana, 1985)
_____, Immigration and Industrialization (Pittsburgh, 1977)
Bodnar, Michael Weber, and Roger Simon, Lives of Their Own (Illinois, 1982)
Kathleen N. Conzen, et al, "The Invention of Ethnicity," Journal of American Ethnic History, 12 (1992), 3-63
Howard Chudacoff, Mobile Americans (Oxford, 1972)
Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door (Oxford, 1977)
Virginia Yans McLaughlin, Family and Community (Cornell, 1977)
Dino Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco (Stanford, 1982)
Kathleen Conzen, Immigrant Milwaukee (Harvard, 1976)
William Toll, The Making of an Ethnic Middle Class (SUNY, 1982)
Deborah Dash Moore, <cite>At Home in America (Columbia, 1981)
Carolyn Golab, Immigrant Destinations (Temple, 1977)
Josef Barton, Peasants and Strangers (Harvard, 1975)
Judith Smith, Family Connections (SUNY 1985)
Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress (Harvard, 1964)
_____, The Other Bostonians (Harvard, 1973)
Ewa Morawska, Insecure Property (Princeton)
_____, For Bread With Butter (Cambridge)
John W. Briggs, An Italian Passage: Immigrants to Three American Cities (Yale)
Olivier Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920 (Chicago, 1982)
Donna Gabaccia, From Sicily to Elizabeth Street (Albany, 1984)
_____, From the Other Side: Women, Gender, and Immigrant Life (Indiana, 1994)
David Gerber, The Making of American Pluralism: Buffalo, New York, 1825-60 (Urbana, 1989)
Samuel L. Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of Promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City (Cornell UP, 1999)
Stanley Nadel, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845-80 (Illinois, 1991)
Gary Mormino, Immigrants on the Hill: Italian-Americans in St Louis (Illinois 1986)
Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure among the Irish, Italians, Jews and Blacks in an American City, 1880-1935 (Cambridge, 1989)
John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the 20th Century Urban North (Chicago, 1996)
James Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle (Illinois, 1987)
Robert Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street (Yale, 1985)
John Tchen, New York Before Chinatown (Johns Hopkins, 1999)
Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will (Cambridge, 198)
Francis Couvares, The Remaking of Pittsburgh (SUNY, 1984)
Richard Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation (Illinois, 1986)
Steven Ross, <cite>Workers on the Edge (Columbia, 1985)
John Cumbler, Working-Class Community (Greenwood, 1978)
Alan Dawley, Class and Community (Harvard, 1976)
Paul Faler, Mechanics and Manufacturers (SUNY, 1981)
Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia (Temple, 1980)
Daniel Walkowitz, Worker City/Company Town (Illinois, 1978)
Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society (Knopf, 1976)
Tamara Hareven, Family Time and Industrial Time (Cambridge, 1982)
Lisabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge, 1990)

African Americans
Kenneth Goings and Raymond A. Mohl, eds., The New African American Urban History (Sage, 1996)
Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (1963)
Alan Spear, Black Chicago (Chicago, 1967.
Thomas Philpot, The Slum and the Ghetto (Oxford, 1978)
James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, 1989)
Joe Trotter, Black Milwaukee (Illinois, 1985)
Joe W. Trotter, ed., The Great Migration in Comparative Perspective (Indiana, 1991)
Olivier Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality (Chicago, 1982
Peter Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks' Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916-30 (Illinois, 1987)
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)
Nathan Huggins, The Harlem Renaissance (1971)
David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (Vintage, 1981)
Thomas W. Hanchett, Sorting Out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975 (North Carolina, 1998)
Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class and Power in 20th Century Norfolk, Virginia (California, 1991)
Christopher Silver and John V. Moeser, The Separate City: Black Communities in the Urban South (Kentucky, 1995)
Howard Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. (Johns Hopkins, 1995)
Ronald Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta (North Carolina, 1996)
Cheryl Greenberg, Or Does It Explode? Black Harlem in the Great Depression (Oxford, 1991)
Michael B. Katz, ed., The “Underclass Debate:” The View from History (Princeton, 1993)
Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Post War Detroit (Princeton, 1996)
Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Cambridge, 1983)
Eric C. Schneider, Vampires, Dragons and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York (Princeton, 1999)

Mexican Americans
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)
Mario Garcia, Desert Immigrants (Yale, 1981)
Juan Gomez Quinonez, Chicano Politics: Reality and Promise, 1940-1990 (New Mexico, 1990)
Thomas E. Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses: the Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854-1941 (Arizona, 1986)
Arnold De León, Ethnicity in the Sunbelt: A History of Mexican Americans in Houston (Houston, 1989)
Richard A. Garcia, Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class: San Antonio, 1929-1941 (Texas A&M, 1991)
David G. Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (California, 1995)
Bradford Luckingham, Minorities in Phoenix: A Profile of Mexican American, Chinese American, and African American Communities, 1860-1992 (Arizona, 1994)
Zaragosa Vargas, Proletarians of the North: A History of Mexican Industrial Workers in Detroit and the Midwest, 1917-1933 (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1993)


10.  Upward and Outward: Modern Cities
(Mar. 28)

All read:
*William R. Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and Commerce in New York (Oxford UP, 1992), esp. chs. 1, 2, 3
*William Leach, "Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890-1925," Journal of American History, 71 (1984), 319-342
*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

Film:  “Proud Towers" (Pride of Place, 55 mins.)

Searching for Urban Cultures—Late-Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century America
Further Reading
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
_____, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Illinois, 1986)
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
Olivier Zunz and David Ward, eds., The Landscape of Modernity (Russell Sage, 1992)
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)
Daniel Pope, The Making of American Advertising (Basic, 1983)
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (California, 1984)
Max Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940 (Chicago, 2000)
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)
Roger Lotchin, Fortress California (Oxford 1992)
Amy Bridges, Morning Glories: Municipal Reform in the Southwest (Princeton, 1997)
Harold Platt, City Building in the New South: The Growth of Public Services in Houston, Texas, 1830-1910 (Temple, 1983)
Robert Fairbanks, For the City as a Whole: Planning, Politics, and the Public Interest in Dallas, Texas, 1900-1965 (Ohio State, 1998)
Patricia Hill, Dallas: The Making of A Modern City (Texas, 1996)
Jon Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance (Johns Hopkins, 1995)
Daniel Bluestone, Constructing Chicago (Yale 1991)
Mona Domosh, Invented Cities: The Creation of Landscape in Nineteenth-century New York & Boston (Yale, 1996)
Gwendolyn Wright, Building the American Dream (Pantheon, 1982)
Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution (MIT, 1981)
Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City (MIT, 1983)
Mel Scott, American City Planning (1969)
Richard Fogelsong, Planning the Capitalist City (Princeton, 1986)
John Reps, The Making of Urban America (Princeton, 1965)
Giorgio Ciucci, et al., The American City (MIT, 1983 (1973).
Donald Krueckeberg, ed., An Introduction to Planning History (Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers, 1983)
Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver, eds., Planning the 20th Century City (Johns Hopkins, 1996)
William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Johns Hopkins, 1989)
David Handlin, The American Home (Little, Brown, 1982)

Comparisons (& see above)
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: The Defeat of Town Planning, 1850-1970 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's U Press, 1971)
_____, ed., Metropolis, 1890-1940 (Chicago, 1984)
H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, eds., The Victorian City, 2 vols. (Routledge, 1973)


11.   6/15 Suburbs: Arcadia for Everyone?
(Apr. 4)

All read:
*[Sample] “North American Cities and Suburbs,” Journal of Urban History, 27, 3 (March 2001) including:
  • Richard Harris and Robert Lewis,” The Geography of North American Cities and Suburbs, 1900-1950,” 262-291
  • Mary Corbin Sies, “North American Suburbs, 1880-1950: Cultural and Social Reconsiderations,” 313-346; and
  • “Dialogue,” 347-361
*Optional: Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston (Harvard, 1962)

Film:  “Suburbs: Arcadia for Everyone" (Pride of Place, 55 mins.)

Further Reading
Michael Ebner, "Re-Reading Suburban America," American Quarterly, 37 (1985), 368-381
Carol O'Connor, "Sorting Out the Suburbs: Patterns of Land Use, Class, and Culture," American Quarterly, 37 (1985), 382-394
Daniel Schaffer, Garden Cities for America (Temple, 1982)
Margaret Marsh, Suburban Lives (Rutgers, 1990)
Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (Oxford, 1985)
Henry Binford, The First Suburbs: Residential Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815-1860 (Chicago, 1985)
Carol O'Connor, A Sort of Utopia, Scarsdale, 1891-1981 (SUNY, 1984)
David Contosta, Suburb in the City: Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, 1850-1990 (Ohio State, 1992)
Zane Miller, Suburb: Neighborhood and Community in Forest Park, Ohio, 1935-1976 (Tennessee, 1981)
Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias (Basic, 1987)
Michael Ebner, Creating Chicago’s North Shore (Chicago, 1988)
Ann Durkin Keating, Building Chicago (Ohio State, 1988)
Alexander von Hoffman, Local Attachments: The Making of an American Urban Neighborhood, 1850-1920 (Johns Hopkins, 1995)
Cathy Knepper, Greenbelt, Maryland: A Living Legacy of the New Deal (Johns Hopkins, 2001)
Richard Harris, Unplanned Suburbs (Johns Hopkins, 1996)
Jon Teaford, Post-Suburbia (Johns Hopkins, 1997)
Andrew Hurley, "Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream" in Postwar Consumer Culture (Basic, 2001)
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: Building and Rebuilding Levittown (SUNY, 1993)
Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened (Basic, 2000)
Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America (Chicago, 1996)
John F. Bauman, Public Housing, Race and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920-1974 (Temple, 1987)
David L. Lewis and Laurence Goldstein, eds., The Automobile and American Culture (Michigan, 1983)
James Flink, America Adopts the Automobile, 1895-1910 (MIT, 1970), among his work.
Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path (Columbia, 1994)
Mark Foster, From Streetcar to Superhighway (Temple 1981)
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

Comparative (& see above)
H.J. Dyos, Victorian Suburb (Leicester, 1973)
_____ and M. Woolf, eds., The Victorian City 2 vols (Routledge, 973)



IV.   Urban Cultures Today and Tomorrow: Beyond Private v. Public?
12.  Research and Writing
(April 11)


13.  Research and Writing
(April 18)


14.  Today and Tomorrow?
(April 25)

Presentation of research proposals. Proposals Due
[no proposals will be accepted late unless permission is received in advance or very unusual circumstances arise]


All read:
*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
*American Quarterly, 46, 1 (March, 1994), 1-30:
  • William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock, "Bold New City or Built-Up 'Burb? Redefining Contemporary Suburbia,", and
  • Responses by Robert Bruegmann, Robert Fishman, Margaret Marsh, June Manning Thomas, 31-54, and
  • Response by Sharpe and Wallock, 55-61
*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)
*Recommended: Robert Beauregard and Sophie Body-Genrot, eds., The Urban Moment (Sage, 1999)
*Recommended: Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (Hill & Wang, 1992)

Comparison
Jeremy Seabrook, In the Cities of the South (Verso, 1996)


Film:  “Mission Hill and the Miracle of Boston” (60 mins.)
[Optional film:  "Style Wars" (69 mins.)]

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: Swedish Council for Building, 1979), 171-180
Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (MIT)
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
"Public Space: Urbanity, Streets, Costs," Dissent, Fall, 1986, 470-494
"Whatever Became of the Public Square," Harpers, July, 1990, 49-60
Gerald Frug, City Making: Building Communities Without Building Walls (Princeton, 1999)
Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power (California, 1991)
_____, The Cultures of Cities (Blackwell, 1995)
_____, Loft Living (Johns Hopkins, 1982)
Christopher Mele, Selling the Lower East Side (Minnesota, 2000)
AHR Forum, "Shopping Malls in America," with Lisabeth Cohen, Thomas Hanchett, and Kenneth Jackson, American Historical Review, 101, 4 (Oct., 1996), 1050-1121
Carl Abbott, The New Urban America (North Carolina, 1987)
_____, "The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities" in the Modern American West (Arizona, 1987)
Andrew Hurley, "Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream" in Postwar Consumer Culture (Basic, 2001)
John Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture (California, 1992)
Deborah Dash Moore, To the Golden Cities (Free Press, 1994)
Richard M. Bernard and Bradley R. Rice, eds., Sunbelt Cities (Texas, 1983)
Raymond A. Mohl, ed., Searching for the Sunbelt (Tennessee, 1990)
Randall Miller and George Pozzetta, eds., Shades of the Sunbelt (Greenwood, 1988)
Robert Fairbanks and Kathleen Underwood, eds., Essays on Sunbelt Cities and Recent Urban America (Texas A&M, 1990)
David C. Perry and Alfred J. Watkins, eds., The Rise of the Sunbelt Cities (Sage, 1977)
Arnold Hirsch and Raymond Mohl, eds., Urban Policy in 20th Century America (Rutgers, 1993)
Michael B. Katz, ed., The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History (Princeton, 1993)
John Logan and Harvey Molotch, City Fortunes (California, 1987)
G. Kearns and C. Philo, eds., Selling Places: The City as Cultural Capital (Pergamon, 1993)
James Duncan and David Ley, eds., Place/Culture/Representation (Routledge, 1993)
Charles Haar, Suburbs Under Seige (Princeton, 1996)
David Kirp, et. al., Our Town: Race, Housing, and the Soul of Suburbia (Rutgers, 1995)
David Rusk, Cities Without Suburbs (Woodrow Wilson Center, 1995)
John H. Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton, 1983)
Robert Fitch, The Assassination of New York City (Verso, 1993)
Paul E. Peterson, ed., The New Urban Reality (Brookings, 1985)
National Research Council, Urban Change and Poverty (National Academy Press)
William Julius Wilson, many works
Christopher Jencks and Paul E. Peterson, eds., The Urban Underclass (Brookings, 1991)
Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Harvard, 1996)
Roger Waldinger, Still the Promised City: African-Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York (Harvard, 1996)
Steven Gregory, Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community (Princeton, 1998)
A. Portes and A. Stepick, City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami (California, 1993)
Victor M. Valle and Rodolfo D. Torres, Latino Metropolis (Minnesota, 2000)
Agustin Lao-Montes and Arlene Davila, eds., Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New York (Columbia, 2001)
Mike Davies, Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. Big City (Verso, 2000)
Michael Jones-Correa, Between Two Nations: The Politics Predicament of Latinos in New York (Cornell, 1998)
Rodolfo Rosales, The Illusion of Inclusion: The Untold Political Story of San Antonio (Texas, 2000)
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso, 1990)
_____, Ecology of Fear (Metropolitan, 1998)
Roger Waldinger and Mehi Bozorgmehr, eds., Ethnic Los Angeles (Russell Sage, 1996)
Rob Kling, Spencer Olin, and Mark Poster, eds., Postsuburban California (California, 1991)
Michael Dear, ed., Rethinking Los Angeles (Sage, 1997)
Charles Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta (Verso, 1996)
Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies (Verso, 1989)
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)
M. Gottdiener, The Social Production of Urban Space (Texas, 1985)
_____, The Theming of America (Westview, 1997)
Nan Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism (Blackwell, 1996)
Delores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (MIT Press, 1995)
On global cities, see especially the work of Saskia Sassen and Janet Abu-Lugod, e.g., Saskia Sassen, The Global City (Princeton, 1992)
Janet Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities (Minnesota, 1999)
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)
Manuel Castells, The Informational City (Blackwell, 1989)
_____, The Urban Question (Edward Arnold, 1977), among his many works

* Library reserve reading


RESEARCH PROPOSALS
The major written requirement for this course is a formal proposal for a comparative research project. Proposals should be no longer than ten to twelve (10-12) double-spaced, typewritten pages, and no shorter than about eight (8) pages. Your topic should fall within the general scope (broadly defined) of urban studies and comparative history. Use the relevant readings to help you in determining that. 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 or a scholarly article. Proposals take a variety of general forms, formats, and organizations. Nevertheless, all research proposals address these key concerns, and for this course, must also include an explicitly comparative perspective:

  1. defining the research problem or subject;


  2. 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;


  3. explaining your own distinctive approach or research strategy, with specific attention to your assumptions and use of specific theoretical and critical approaches, your question(s) and/or hypothesis(es), the ways in which your research can be distinguished from that of other researchers;


  4. the nature of the comparison attempted and your use(s)s of the comparative method or approach need to be stated clearly and justified. This includes discussion of the “how” of how you plan to conduct your comparison as well as the “why” you wish to make comparison(s). Use the course readings on comparative history and comparative urban history in identifying your approach to comparison and the nature of the comparison(s). Indicate how a comparative approach will make your study different from other approaches and the specific advantages (and also complications, perhaps) from taking a comparative approach.


  5. the primary and secondary 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;


  6. the methods you expect to employ to probe those sources, including but not limited to comparative methods; and


  7. 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 the University of Texas at San Antonio (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.

Comments by Professor Graff:
In order to meet a new degree requirement for courses in comparative history, selected additional readings and new assignments have been added to the course.
[See previous versions of this course in the H-Urban Syllabus Archive. --Ed.]


Syllabus prepared for the H-Urban Syllabus Archive 16 Feb 2002.