Urban America Research Articles

65-OR: Differences in the Use of Diabetes Medications with Cardiorenal Benefits between Rural and Urban America

Rural Americans are more likely than urban Americans to have poorly controlled diabetes and to die from diabetes-related complications. This is due to multiple biopsychosocial factors, including poor access to primary and specialty care. Previous studies found disparities in the use of newer glucose-lowering medications with cardiovascular and renal benefits (GLP-1RA and SGLT2i) by women, Black patients, and low-income patients. Whether there are disparities in the use of GLP-1RA and SGLT2i based on rurality is unknown. Using a de-identified dataset of commercially insured and Medicare Advantage beneficiaries with type 2 diabetes, we examined diabetes medication use across the spectrum of rurality: urban (population >50,000), small town (population 2500-50,000), and rural (population <2500). Patients with type 2 diabetes and vascular disease (rural n=25,684, small town n=147,045, urban n=810,647) were prescribed the preferred GLP-1-RA (rural 6.6%, small town 7.2%, urban 6.5%) and SLGT2i (rural 4.6%, small town 5.3%, urban 4.5%) less often than non-preferred sulfonylureas (rural 28.7%, small town 29%, urban 27.4%). Patients with heart failure (rural n=8,818, small town n=50,489, urban n=247,621) were prescribed preferred SGLT2i (rural 3.7%, small town 4.3%, urban 3.5%) less often than non-preferred DPP4i (rural 10.3%, small town 11.8%, urban 12%) and sulfonylurea (rural 27.4%, small town 27.7%, urban 26.0%). Patients with stages 3-4 chronic kidney disease (rural n=7444, small town n=43,483, urban n=236,982) were prescribed preferred GLP-1-RA (rural 7.6%, small town 8%, urban 7.2%) and SGLT2i (rural 3.4%, small town 3.7%, urban 3.3%) less often than non-preferred sulfonylureas (rural 29.9%, small town 30.8%, urban 30%). Given these data, interventions to improve prescribing of diabetes medications with cardiorenal benefits are needed in all areas of the US. Rural disparities in diabetes outcomes do not appear to be driven by differences in medication use alone. Disclosure K.Steiger: None. K.Swarna: None. J.Herrin: Consultant; Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices Companies. R.G.Mccoy: Consultant; Emmi. Funding National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (K23DK114497)

Erratum to Neoliberal Cities: The Remaking of Postwar Urban America

Erratum to Neoliberal Cities: The Remaking of Postwar Urban America

The Problems and Potential of Higher Education in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Urban America

The Problems and Potential of Higher Education in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Urban America

Review of “Medicine at the Margins: EMS Workers in Urban America”

Journal Article Review of “Medicine at the Margins: EMS Workers in Urban America” Get access By Christopher Prener Fordham University Press, 2022, 304 pages. https://www.fordhampress.com/9781531501082/medicine-at-the-margins/ Hyeyoung Oh Nelson Hyeyoung Oh Nelson University of Colorado Denver Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, soad058, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soad058 Published: 03 May 2023 Article history Received: 31 March 2023 Accepted: 11 April 2023 Published: 03 May 2023

A Letter from the American Historical Association to California’s Placentia–Yorba Linda Unified School District

Research Article| May 01 2023 A Letter from the American Historical Association to California’s Placentia–Yorba Linda Unified School District James R. Grossman James R. Grossman JAMES R. GROSSMAN is executive director of the American Historical Association. Formerly vice-president for research and education at the Newberry Library, he has taught at the University of Chicago and the University of California, San Diego. The author of Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration and A Chance to Make Good: African-Americans, 1900–1929, Grossman was project director and coeditor of the print and digital Encyclopedia of Chicago. He is editor emeritus of the University of Chicago Press book series “Historical Studies of Urban America,” which he abandoned to his colleagues after fifty volumes. Articles and short essays have focused on urban history, African American history, ethnicity, higher education, and the place of history in public culture. Short pieces have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Time, New York Daily News, North Shore Magazine, Chronicle of Higher Education, The Hill, and elsewhere. Grossman’s consulting experience includes history-related projects generated by BBC, Smithsonian, various “Teaching American History” programs, and a wide range of theater companies, films, museums, libraries, and foundations. He has served on governing boards of the American Council of Learned Societies, Association of American Colleges and Universities, Center for Research Libraries, National Humanities Alliance, Vivian G. Harsh Society, and Chicago Metro History Education Center. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2023) 100 (2): 78–81. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.2.78 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation James R. Grossman; A Letter from the American Historical Association to California’s Placentia–Yorba Linda Unified School District. California History 1 May 2023; 100 (2): 78–81. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.2.78 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search In January 2022, the American Historical Association (AHA) sent a letter to the leadership of the Placentia–Yorba Linda Unified School District (California) opposing a proposed Resolution No. 21–12, “Resolution Opposing the Teaching of Critical Race Theory” (see the proposed resolution at https://4.files.edl.io/e3c9/11/22/21/155531-39d91aa4-c235-4949-a1f4-153f76aa17e8.pdf). We were alerted to this agenda item by a resident concerned about censorship and the quality of history education. We immediately noticed that its text resembled bills being introduced in many state legislatures; the AHA had already begun writing letters to members of those legislatures (for the AHA’s list of letters, organized by state—at this writing, eighteen states—see https://www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/teaching-history-with-integrity/freedom-to-learn). In this particular letter the AHA noted that “the proposal singled out one set of ideas—critical race theory—as a subject that cannot be taught in Placentia–Yorba Linda schools. The letter includes a link to a statement criticizing similar legislative efforts to restrict education about racism in American... You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review: Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, Race Brokers: Housing Markets and Segregation in 21st Century Urban America

Book Review: Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, <i>Race Brokers: Housing Markets and Segregation in 21st Century Urban America</i>

Building Downtown Los Angeles: The Politics of Race and Place in Urban America

Building Downtown Los Angeles: The Politics of Race and Place in Urban America

Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical by Shaul Magid

Reviewed by: Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical by Shaul Magid Nancy Sinkoff Shaul Magid. Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. 296 pp. When Rabbi Meir Kahane (1932–1990) founded the militant Jewish Defense League (JDL) in 1968 as a response to the showdown between advocates of community control in New York City’s public schools, who were mostly Black—as were the students—and the union membership of the United Federation of Teachers, who were mostly white and Jewish, in the legendary Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike of that same year, the slogan “Never Again!” became the organization’s rallying cry. This call to arms, which directly invoked the destruction of European Jewry to galvanize American Jews to reject the communal politics that Kahane considered feckless, pathetic, and emasculating, was not merely symbolic. Rather, Kahane hoped, American Jewish activists would take one page out of the confrontational playbook of the Black Panthers and Young Lords and another out of the performative playbook of the Yippies and embrace a politics that expressed hadar (Jewish [End Page 231] pride) through physical toughness to defend Jews in their neighborhoods and to counteract the lure of assimilation, in short, to write a script for Jewish survival in urban America. In Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical, Shaul Magid seeks to restore Kahane and his ideas to the postwar American landscape, to explain his militancy, and, in so doing, to unsettle the narrative of American Jewish history that has been characterized by a preoccupation with the “cult of synthesis”—Jonathan Sarna’s phrase—the belief that the American Jewish experience has been a triumph of consensus between liberal American and Jewish values. Magid also wants to redress the misconception that American Jewish radicalism only lived among activists on the Left. In fact, it was postwar America that nurtured Kahane’s right-wing radicalism. Though Kahane was disavowed by most, but not all, American Jewish leaders before his immigration to Israel in 1971, and though his party, Kach, was ultimately barred from the Knesset, his views, argues Magid, have had a profound afterlife in contemporary Jewish life. (The fact that Otzmah Yehudit/Jewish Power, the heir apparent to Kach, won six seats in the 2022 Knesset elections, proves Magid’s point.) Meir Kahane is thus not only a cultural biography of Kahane, but also a cautionary exposé of his ideas’ lasting influence. A scholar of Jewish thought, Magid chose to narrate Kahane’s life by examining his somewhat unsystematic, even contradictory, ideas through six chapters, “Liberalism,” “Radicalism,” “Race and Racism,” “Communism,” “Zionism,” and “Militant Post-Zionist Apocalypticism.” In Magid’s analysis, their overarching consistency was Kahane’s critique of postwar American Jewish “liberalism,” and the book successfully roots Kahane’s preoccupations with Jewish survival in the American Diaspora and his program for transforming what he viewed as a doomed secular Zionist project in Israel as a response to this critique. Born in 1932, reared in an Orthodox home, and educated until he was thirteen at a Mir yeshiva, Kahane’s childhood was informed by the Holocaust consciousness that pervaded his Borough Park survivor neighborhood. Kahane studied law at New York University, worked as a journalist, founded a Jewish summer camp that taught martial arts, and, engaging with the issues that rocked American and Jewish society in the 1960s (civil rights and racial reckoning, anticommunism, Israel’s victory in 1967, the plight of Soviet Jewry, and urban decay), fashioned himself as an activist prophet against the American Jewish establishment. Kahane embraced violence as a necessary means to effect social change. “Every Jew a .22” was his brand (8) and he and his squad of disenfranchised street Jews reacted to the political crises of their day by creating citizens’ patrols to protect elderly, poor Jews on Brooklyn’s streets, threatening to meet a Black nationalist activist demanding reparations at Temple Emanu-El with lead pipes, disrupting performances of Soviet dancers, breaking into Jewish communal leadership meetings, and taking out hyperbolic ads critical of the Jewish establishment’s alleged failure to defend...

(Mis-)belonging to the climate-resilient city: Making place in multi-risk communities of racialized urban America

ABSTRACT Through climate adaptation planning cities are transforming places and relations, most recently via green climate resilient infrastructure (GRI). Yet, GRI’s incorporation into existing, racialized infrastructure systems of urban development, regeneration and finance has raised questions about the socio-cultural impacts and justice dimensions of recent directions in climate adaptation planning and urbanism. While critical scholars highlight the exclusion of historically marginalized residents, this paper’s analysis of the impacts of GRI-driven planning for sense of belonging reveals a complex and multi-faceted experience of gentrification and displacement in the racialized, settler colonial city. Drawing on insights from civic actors about their lived experience of green and climate resilient projects in Boston, Massachusetts, we develop a novel understanding of belonging, which entails degrees of (mis)belonging. Our analysis uncovers three pathways by which climate urbanism shapes belonging into various alienated, subordinated, assimilated and emancipated forms, and reveals the kinds of political subjects and socio-cultural relations that emerge from the lived experience of climate adaptation projects. More broadly, this study sheds light on how less visible placemaking practices and alternative modes of addressing socio-climate vulnerability contribute to climate justice and injustice dynamics.

It’s Life as I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940–1980

It’s Life as I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940–1980

Development, Pre-Testing and Feasibility Testing of Multi-Component Interventions, Critical for Mental Health Promotion in Primary Care among Mexican-American Adolescents Living in Rural America.

Rural America is often viewed as bereft of social problems facing urban America. Rural families, however, experience stressors due to low employment rates, fewer educational opportunities, a relatively increased incidence of poverty and limited access to mental health care. These families are at increased risk for substance use, violence and associated psychological distress that occurs when failing to cope with stress. Rural children, experiencing these stressors and affected by barriers of culture, poverty and remote access to mental health care, are at higher risk for these negative health outcomes. The need for culturally appropriate intervention tailored to the target population, rural Mexican-American adolescent women, is consistently supported by evidence. A one-size-fits-all approach most likely will not effectively impact behavior and health outcomes. The fact that few studies evaluated effects of mental health interventions on multiple outcomes including substance use, violence, unintended pregnancy and STI is problematic given previously noted associations. Evidence is needed to evaluate associations between mental health interventions and these outcomes. This manuscript presents results of preliminary studies, conducted using a multi-method research approach for development, pre-testing and feasibility testing of interventions for rural primary care settings. This methodology is appropriate when dealing with the complexity of social phenomena. It provides a look at an issue from all angles and thereby the cultural context and perspective informing intervention development. These multi-component interventions are critical for mental health promotion among Mexican-American adolescent women living in rural America.

Toward a New Project for Equality and Justice—In Housing, and Beyond: A Rejoinder

I offer a rejoinder to the five responses to my article, “Beyond Opportunity Hoarding,” generously provided by Professors Bates, Dawkins, Ellen, Greenlee, and Lens. I argue it is imperative we face soberly three central problematics looming over the current debate: a) the enormity and profoundness of America's urban problems; b) the failure of the Opportunity Project to address these problems; and c) the reasons for this failure. I conclude by reiterating the need for an alternative strategy (or a new Project) to advance equality and justice, one built around a robust and large-scale program of Community Wealth Building. I discuss Community Wealth Building's appropriateness as an area of inquiry and engagement for housing researchers and practitioners, and I consider the challenges confronting its feasibility in light of several salient (and hopeful) political and social developments unfolding in contemporary urban America.

Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization ed. by Kent Blansett, Cathleen D. Cahill, and Andrew Needham

Reviewed by: Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization ed. by Kent Blansett, Cathleen D. Cahill, and Andrew Needham Mikaëla M. Adams Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization. Edited by Kent Blansett, Cathleen D. Cahill, and Andrew Needham. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2022. Pp. x, 332. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-7663-5.) Inspired by the seminal work of Philip Deloria in Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence, Kans., 2004) and Coll Thrush in Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (Seattle, 2007), scholars of Native North America have increasingly pushed back against narratives that depict Indigenous people as rural, primitive, and premodern. Recent monographs by Andrew Needham, Colin Calloway, Daniel H. Usner, Laura M. Furlan, Kent Blansett, Douglas K. Miller, Nicolas G. Rosenthal, and Renya K. Ramirez—among others—have revealed the vibrant roles Indians have played in urban America as well as the creative ways that they have navigated and built lives in these metropolitan spaces. Far from being peripheral to the story of urbanization, Indigenous people, their lands, their resources, and their nations in fact have played a central role. Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization brings together cutting-edge scholarship on urban Native America and provides an important theoretical framework for making sense of this history in the context of American settler colonialism. Indian Cities is divided into four parts. Part 1 illuminates the savvy politicking of Indigenous people in colonial urban centers. As Nathaniel Holly reveals, ordinary Cherokees had “intimate knowledge” of the power structures of eighteenth-century Charlestown, South Carolina, which they used to access and define the terms of colonial trade (p. 27). Daniel H. Usner shows how the diplomatic rituals of Indigenous people in early New Orleans contributed to the “civic culture” of this port city, while also ensuring its survival through facilitating the exchange of goods and services (p. 52). [End Page 192] Part 2 turns to the nineteenth century and focuses on the ways that settler actions and mythmaking endeavored both to erase and to justify the erasure of Indigenous people from the nation’s burgeoning cities. Essays by Ari Kelman, Mishuana R. Goeman, C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, and Maurice Crandall explore how settlers performed Indigenous dispossession and disappearance in urban locales as far-flung as St. Paul, Minnesota, Niagara Falls, New York, Washington, D.C., and the mining boomtowns of central Arizona. As the authors point out, Indigenous people did not passively accept their presumed fate but instead fought for acknowledgment of their ongoing presence. Part 3 includes tales from the best-known period of Indian urbanization—the post–World War II era of termination, relocation, and Red Power. Elaine Marie Nelson and Sasha Maria Suarez extend the chronology of this era by showcasing how Native people made and remade Rapid City, South Dakota, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, from the early twentieth century onward. They show how Native communities devised strategies to survive economically, gather inconspicuously, and organize politically, as Suarez puts it, “(re)indigenizing the space of the city” (p. 199). Meanwhile, Douglas K. Miller and David Hugill focus on postwar Indigenous efforts to create community institutions in Dallas, Texas, and Winnipeg, Manitoba, that linked Native residents both to other “Indians living in urban places” and to their reservation communities (p. 220). These narratives of community organizing honor the ingenuity and resourcefulness of Indigenous people as they reclaimed urbanized home-lands or forged new connections that allowed them to survive and thrive in distant metropolises. Part 4 brings the volume up to the present with insightful essays on the anti–Dakota Access Pipeline movement and the COVID-19 crisis. As Dana E. Powell and Jennifer Denetdale reveal, the consequences of American settler colonialism for urban development are far from over. Although each essay makes a valuable contribution, the standout works are by Genetin-Pilawa and Powell. Genetin-Pilawa’s analysis of the ways that various Indigenous delegates proclaimed their presence in the U.S. capital deftly challenges readers to “take the time to look” for “hidden Indian histories” that may not be so hidden after all (p. 133). Through her detailed description of the grassroots construction of the Oceti Sakowin camp in South Dakota, Powell reimagines...

The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity, by Jonathan Freedman

Reviewed by: The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity by Jonathan Freedman Beth Newman (bio) The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity, by Jonathan Freedman; pp. ix + 297. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2021, $95.00, $30.00 paper, $29.99 ebook. What do Jewishness and late-nineteenth-century decadence have to do with one another? Depending on one’s conceptions of “Jews” and of “decadence,” the answer could seem to be not much—or quite a lot, none of it good. Influential late-nineteenth-century anti-Semites used the word decadent and its cousin “degenerate” as slurs with which to vilify Jewish people and foment hatred of Jews, a theme taken up as policy during the years of Nazi ascendancy. In The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity, Jonathan Freedman folds this fact into his rich, complex celebration of the decadent movement and its long afterlife, and the Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals who participated in both. [End Page 698] A prolific scholar of English and American literature, Jewish studies, and modernism, Freedman shows that Jewish people both adopted decadent themes and topoi to establish themselves as fully modern participants in the culture of major Western societies, and adapted them to specifically Jewish interests and preoccupations. He demonstrates compellingly that in doing so, they contributed to the shaping of an emergent modernism. Freedman makes this argument in seven chapters that are by turns erudite, gossipy, nuanced, funny, and moving. He stretches his canvas across the half-century or so that he calls the long fin de siècle from 1870 to 1920, extending it geographically from urban America to European centers of culture. Victorianists will be immediately interested in his first three chapters, which in different ways focus on the fin de siècle they know, surveyed from an unfamiliar angle of vision. The first chapter argues that the history of Jewish persecution, together with the Torah’s narratives of catastrophe and decline from Eden forward, created a receptive audience for decadent themes. Here, Freedman also constructs a network of Jewish critics, patrons, art historians, dealers, gallery owners, editors, and other taste-makers who provided a crucial infrastructure for the production and circulation of fin-de-siècle decadence. A chapter titled “Oscar Wilde among the Jews” explores the work of Jewish writers and artists whom Wilde championed as well as of those who championed him. These include Amy Levy, Ada Leverson, Julia Frankau, Marc-André Raffalovich, William Rothenstein, and Jacob Epstein, the designer of Wilde’s gravesite monument. Perhaps even more interesting is what Freedman discovers about Wilde’s popularity among Yiddish-speaking immigrants in London and New York who flocked to performances of his plays in the Yiddish theater, and purchased translations of his works in Hebrew and Yiddish. He shows that Yiddish-speaking revolutionaries treated “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1891) as required reading at a time when Wilde was scorned by the mainstream reading public and press. A chapter uncovering the phenomenon of “Jewish Salomania” traces the enthusiastic adoption of Salomé by Jewish artists, dancers, and film actors (including Alla Nazimova of Charles Bryant’s 1923 silent film), embraced by them even before Wilde’s play added to the title character’s appeal. This chapter is lavishly illustrated, and Freedman pauses to provide compelling, often brilliant readings of the images, including of the 1897 Alphonse Mucha poster of Sarah Bernhardt that graces the book’s cover. In these chapters, as in the conclusion, Freedman serves as collector culling materials from a wide array of sources, arranging them into an often dizzying but unfailingly interesting and almost always entirely persuasive account that supports his thesis, each time from a different direction. Gender and sexuality, recurrent themes throughout, are central to one of the two chapters that crown the book: bravura readings of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1927–40). Freedman observes that although Proust identified as Catholic, his mother was Jewish, making him Jewish in the eyes of rabbinic law. Even readers unfamiliar with Proust or the body of commentary on his vexed relationship to Jewishness...

Growing Up Together: Brooklyn’s Truant School and the Carceral and Educational State, 1857-1924

This article uses the history of Brooklyn’s Truant School from its inception in 1857 to its demise in 1924 to highlight the interconnected rationales for public education and juvenile incarceration in nineteenth and early twentieth century urban America. Drawing on newspaper accounts and Board of Education records, I seek to historicize current understandings of the so-called school-to-prison pipeline by examining how the nation’s modern penal and school systems were developed together during the antebellum and Progressive eras, not in tension, but as two sides of the same coin.

Where Protection Meets Punishment: Public Education and the Carceral State in Urban America

This essay calls upon scholars in the largely siloed fields of history of education and carceral studies to examine the history of American education and criminal legal systems in tandem rather than in isolation from one another. In introducing the special section’s articles, it proposes a new template for historicizing the “school-to-prison pipeline” in particular and the intertwined evolution of the state’s protective, preventative, and punitive power more broadly. Specifically, the essay discusses how the carceral state both moved into and emerged from within public schools prior to and following the 1960s and 1970s. It also notes that the relationship between public education and the carceral state evolved in highly localized and contingent ways based upon the actions of individuals, organizations, and institutions at the community, state, and federal level. The essay concludes with a discussion of considerations for further research.

Review of “Building Downtown Los Angeles: The Politics of Race and Place in Urban America”

Los Angeles is perhaps one of the most studied cities in the United States. Compared to older industrial cities, like Chicago and Detroit, or to Northeastern cities with high residential segregation rates, like Boston and New York, Los Angeles still represents a more recently established metropolis, with twelve-lane freeways, eternal glamour, and sunshine. An unmistakable feeling of freedom overtakes the visitor, who gets off the airplane and starts driving on West Century Boulevard, lined up with toll, beautiful palm trees. The sense of freedom and glamour, however, quickly wears off if the visitor continuous to drive into South Central Los Angeles or down memory lane to the beating of Rodney King and the riots following the police officers’ acquittal. The contradictions of Los Angeles as a modern metropolis are captured with detailed precision and historical insight by Leland Saito in his book “Building Downtown Los Angeles: The Politics of Race and Place in Urban America.” The focus of the book is a juxtaposition of a well-known process of urban real estate development with the far less known building of a diverse coalition for social justice.

From Other Journals: A Review of Recent Articles by Our Editorial Team.

This review is meant to highlight recent publications from other journals that are relevant to pediatric cardiologists. The articles chosen for this edition look at the outcomes of catheter-based interventions for aortic stenosis, the effect of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease risk factors on the adult congenital heart disease population, the difference in mortality from congenital heart disease between rural and urban America, preoperative NT-proBNP as a predictor of Fontan outcomes, and an overview of the utilization and outcomes of the Rastelli, Nikaidoh, and REV procedures.

Staging Urbanism: A Study of City Life in Selected American Plays

The mid-20th century saw many American playwrights explore the realities of city life to powerful effect. Plays that emerged during this time paint an interesting picture of urban America as a paradoxical place of endless opportunity and limited resources. The characters of this setting have the dramatic potential to be uniquely tragic, often attracted to cities by promises of economic freedom only to be destroyed by the tough and competitive nature of urban life. The study aims at constructing a contextual reference framework within which Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, Arthur Laurents’ West Side Story, and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun are analyzed to explore how the stressful environments of the city shaped life for different groups of urban residents. This study employs a textual analysis method to investigate how these three iconic plays of the mid-20th century create the tragic and tumultuous setting of the American city. By analyzing selections of dialogue from each play, the influence of city life on the words and actions of characters in each play will be shown to be instrumental in conjuring the hectic and often desperate realities of urban life in mid-20th century America.

To Live Peaceably Together: The American Friends Service Committee's Campaign for Open Housing. By Tracy E. K'Meyer. Historical Studies of Urban America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 240 pp. $45.00 cloth.

To Live Peaceably Together: The American Friends Service Committee's Campaign for Open Housing. By Tracy E. K'Meyer. Historical Studies of Urban America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 240 pp. $45.00 cloth. - Volume 91 Issue 4