The New Suburban History by Kevin M. Kruse, Thomas J. Sugrue

Abstract

152 Michigan Historical Review elementary school; and developed a human-relations curriculum for teachers. Continuing the work she did on Progressive-Era clubwomen in her book, Toward a Tenderer Humanity and a Nobler Womanhood, Knupfer argues in this new volume that midwestern black clubwomen flourished from 1930 through the 1950s. These middle-class women offered social welfare assistance to new migrants and were patrons of the arts. The author uses the efforts of Irene McCoy Gaines to ?lustrate clubwomen's continued relevance. Gaines in particular was instrumental in helping the National Association of Colored Women have an impact on national and international politics, and this is of particular interest to historians of women's international activism during the cold war. Local efforts also flourished in such organizations as the Parkway Community House that hosted forums, theater performances, and exhibits that employed the arts to protest educational segregation, dilapidated housing, and employment ctiscrimination. The Chicago Black Renaissance has much to offer midwestern historians. Students of the Chicago Freedom Movement can trace its origins during the 1940s in teachers' protests about educational segregation and their use of curriculum bu?ding as cultural resistance. The Chicago Metropolitan YWCA's pioneering work on race relations in the 1960s has its roots in the Bronzev?le's South Parkway Y. Welfare-rights historians w?l appreciate Knupfer's accounts of public housing residents' leadership and community budding. A minor fault of this work is that the author's po?tical analysis of the Chicago Renaissance as a cultural front would benefit from more historical context about the Popular Front. Amy Schneidhorst University of Illinois at Chicago Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue, eds. The New Suburban History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. 264. Bibliography. IUustrations. Index. Notes. Paper, $24.00. The New Suburban History is a collection of ten essays on the American suburban landscape written by scholars in the field. According to the editors, who are known more for their studies on cities (Kruse on Adanta, Sugrue on Detroit), these articles put suburbs Book Reviews 153 and suburbanization into "a broader metropolitan perspective" that notes their "political and economic relationship with central cities, competing suburbs, and their regions" (p. 6). Hence, there are chapters by Matthew D. Lassiter on the conflict in the early 1970s about court-ordered busing in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg metropolitan area of North Carolina, by Margaret Pugh O'Mara on how federal cold-war defense policies coincided with mass suburbanization and influenced the locales of high-tech suburbs from California to Massachusetts, by Robert O. Self on the politics of suburban growth in San Francisco's East Bay suburbs, and by Peter Siskind on examples of discontent and reform in the suburban counties of Washington, D.C., and New York City. The salient issue of most of the essays, however, is race. The first two articles by David M. P. Freund and Arnold R. Hirsch deal exclusively with how federal policies of the New Deal and Eisenhower years excluded African Americans from the new post-World-War-II suburbs. By withholding FHA and VA mortgages from African Americans, the government kept them segregated in the central cities. Moreover, federal agencies denied that these policies were c?scriminatory, downplayed their role in the housing and credit markets, and insisted that the segregated suburbs arose solely from a race-neutral free market in housing. The essay by Andrew Wiese elaborates on how middle-class African Americans aspired to a suburban home and saw this as asserting their equality with whites, wh?e the four chapters with a metropolitan focus also reveal the exclusionary forces at work and the segregated geography of these broad areas. These seven articles "push [Suburban History] in new directions" (p. 5), but two others do not. Becky Nicolaides rehashes critiques of suburbia by urban sociologists and theorists, wh?e Michael Jones-Correa speculates on the effect of recent immigrants who move direcdy into suburban areas. The tenth chapter, by legal scholar Gerald Frug, explains how exclusionary techniques now in use are eroding the concept of the "public" in metropolitan America and is the most disturbing essay of the lot. Drawing upon exc?dent research and...