Introductory description

America is an urban nation today, yet Americans have long had deeply ambivalent feelings toward the city. This 15 CATS module will explore the historical origins of that ambivalence - and how historians have interpreted it over time - by tracing several overarching themes in American urban history with emphasis on the twentieth century.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

1. Urban dreams and urban nightmares
2. Gender and class at the turn of the century
3. Immigration and reform in the twentieth century city
4. Postwar urban politics on the right
5. The fire this time: inequality in the post-1960 metropolis
6. Policing the city
7. Urban subcultures and radical countercultures
8. Gentrification, or, how to kill a city
9. 21st century urban protest

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a detailed knowledge of US history at large, including key historical moments such as early 20th century migration, the New Deal, post-war politics on the left and right, and the 1960s and 1970s rights revolutions. This will allow you to historicize contemporary US debates about gentrification, (im)migrants, refugees, environmental protests, and social justice movements.
• Develop a basic knowledge of the ways in which class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality intersect to complicate our understanding of social movements, urban policy, and contesting views of the city.
• Communicate ideas and findings through oral and written discussion, adapting to a range of situations, audiences and degrees of complexity.
• Generate ideas through the analysis of a broad range of primary source material, showing an appreciation of the possibilities and limitations of analysing primary sources relating to the history of cities, including ephemera, governmental and municipal documents, and media.
• Analyse and evaluate the contributions made by existing scholarship, drawing upon scholarship from urban historians as well as historians of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.
• Act with limited supervision and direction to explore topics and themes of interest within defined guidelines in order to develop individual research skills, accepting responsibility for achieving deadlines.

Indicative reading list

Books:

• Eric H. Monkkonen, America becomes urban: the development of U.S. cities & towns, 1780-1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) [ebook]
• Sam B. Warner, The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (New York; London: Harper and Row, 1972) [print book]
• George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994) [ebook]
• Pauline Lipman, The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City (New York: Routledge, 2011) [ebook]
• Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter (eds.), African American Urban History since World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) [ebook]
• Carl H. Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015) [ebook]
• Peter C. Baldwin, In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012) [ebook]
• Lilia Fernandez, Brown in the Windy City: Mexican and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2012) [ebook]
• Lorrin Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New York City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010) [ebook]
• Guian A. McKee, The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) [ebook]
• Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) [ebook]
• Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) [ebook]
• Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) [ebook]
• John Henry Hepp IV, The Middle-Class City: Transforming Space and Time in Philadelphia, 1876-1926 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) [ebook]
• A.K Sandoval-Strausz and Nancy H. Kwak (eds.), Making Cities Global: The Transnational Turn in Urban History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) [ebook]
• Laam Hae, The Gentrification of Nightlife and the Right to the City: Regulating Spaces of Social Dancing in New York (New York: Routledge, 2012) [ebook]
• Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: Guilford Press, 2003) [ebook]
• David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2013) [ebook]
• Chris Butler, Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to the City (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012) [ebook]

Articles:

• Timothy J. Gilfoyle, “White Cities, Linguistic Turns, and Disneylands: The New Paradigms of Urban History,” Reviews in American History 26 (March 1998): 175-204
• Sean Patrick Adams, “Warming the Poor and Growing Consumers: Fuel Philanthropy in the Early Republic’s Urban North,” Journal of American History 95 (June 2008): 65-94
• Leslie M. Harris, “Slavery, Emancipation, and Class Formation in Colonial and Early National New York City,” Journal of Urban History 30 (March 2004): 330-59
• Michael J. Rawson “The Nature of Water: Reform and the Antebellum Crusade for Municipal Water in Boston,” Environmental History 9 (July 2004): 411-35
• Christopher F. Jones, “The Carbon-Consuming Home: Residential Markets and Energy Transitions,” Enterprise & Society 12 (December 2011): 790-823
• Maureen A. Flanagan, “Gender and Urban Political Reform: The City Club and the Woman's City Club of Chicago in the Progressive Era,” American Historical Review 95:4 (October 1990): 1032-50
• Timo Schrader, “The Colors of Loisaida: Embedding Murals in Community Activism,” Journal of Urban History 44 (May 2018): 519-532
• Josh Sides, “Excavating the Postwar Sex District in San Francisco,” Journal of Urban History 35 (March 2006): 355-79
• Jonathan Zimmerman, “Ethnics against Ethnicity: European Immigrants and Foreign-Language Instruction, 1890-1940,” Journal of American History 88 (March 2002): 1383-1404
• Lon Kurashige, “The Problem of Biculturalism: Japanese American Identity and Festival before World War II,” Journal of American History 86 (March 2000): 1632-54
• Michelle M. Nickerson, “Politically Desperate Housewives: Women and Conservatism in Postwar Los Angeles,” California History 86 (June 2009), 4-21
• Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History 97 (December 2010): 703-34
• Robert O. Self, “‘To Plan Our Liberation’: Black Power and the Politics of Place in Oakland, 1965-1977,” Journal of Urban History 26 (September 2000): 759-92

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.