REGIONAL AND NATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON AMERICAN URBAN HISTORY

Abstract

Kenneth Severens. Charleston: Antebellum Architecture and Civic Destiny. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988. xiii + 315 pp. Illus. Margaret Ripley Wolfe. Kingsport, Tennessee: A Planned American City. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987. xii + 259 pp. Illus., maps. Michael H. Ebner. Creating Chicago's North Shore: A Suburban History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. xxx + 338 pp. Illus., maps. Eric H. Monkkonen. America Becomes Urban: The Development of U.S. Cities & Towns, 1780-1980. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. xvi + 332 pp. Illus. Although it can be dated at least as far back as 1933 and the publication of Arthur Schlesinger, Sr.'s The Rise of the City: 1878-1898, urban history as a specialty in American historiography clearly came into its own in the 1960s, at the same time that politicians, public figures and the media in the United States publicized the idea of an "urban crisis." Amidst signs of hope and despair, urban renewal and ghetto riots, scholars and the general public alike paid more attention to the nation's cities than ever before. American urban history thrived in this climate of public awareness of "urban dilemmas." Oxford University Press, for example, in 1967 launched its Urban Life in America series, which published a number of pivotal works in the field. A new journal, the Journal of Urban History, began in 1974. During the 1960s and early 1970s, much scholarly attention was given to the social and geographic mobility of the "inarticulate," an historical perspective on the under-class of American cities which was in keeping with the ideology of political activists involved with contemporary problems. This topic was the central preoccupation of those who engaged in the "new urban history."