You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
One of the most prominent and dynamic African-American neighborhoods in U.S. history, Paradise Valley served as a social and cultural mecca for Detroit's black community from the 1920s through the 1950s. Now the site of stadiums and freeways, the area was once home to places like the Gotham Hotel and the Surf Club, and welcomed the likes of Billie Holiday, Joe Louis, and Sammy Davis Jr. This book uses more than 200 previously unpublished photographs to take readers on a rare tour of the entertainers, entrepreneurs, businesses, and events that made the now-lost Paradise Valley legendary.
Nineteenth-century Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their villages in Bengal. Demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s boardwalks into the segregated South. Bald’s history reveals cross-racial affinities below the surface of early twentieth-century America.
An economist examines the decline of American cities and offers a strategy for their rejuvenation based on respect for property rights. American cities, once centers of opportunity, are all too often plagued by poverty and decay. One need only look at the ruins of Detroit to see how far some cities have fallen. Yet other examples, like Boston and San Francisco, show that such a fate is reversible. In Boom Towns, Stephen J.K. Walters diagnoses the root causes of urban decline in order to prescribe remedies that will enable cities to thrive once again. Using vivid evocations of iconic towns and the people who helped shape their development, Walters shows how public revitalization policies often do more harm than good. He then outlines a more promising set of policies to remedy the capital shortage that continues to afflict many cities and needlessly limit their residents’ opportunities. With its fresh interpretation of one of the American quandaries of our day, Boom Towns offers a novel contribution to the debate about American cities and a program for their restoration.
Reveals how many of our customs and wedding rituals were the product of sophisticated advertising campaigns, merchandising promotions, and entrepreneurial innovations. The businesses and entrepreneurs, from jewelers to bridal consultants and caterers, set the stage for today's multibillion-dollar industry.
Wayne Rudolph Davidson delves deeper into his family history in this second book of his When Clans Collide trilogy. Exploring his own personal branch that stems from the genealogical trunk of the distinguished Davidson family tree, he writes from the perspective of an African-American male born in the post-World War II era caught in a firestorm of extraordinary social change, civil disturbance, and a burgeoning drug culture. His life runs in tandem with the migration of African-Americans from the rural South to urban centers in the North and historic events such as the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. He seamlessly blends his family genealogy and his own mistakes and triumphs with American history. From being an unemployed autoworker living and working in a dark tunnel to positions of responsibility and authority as a member of the U.S. Army in strategic places around the world, in this book, the author gets a chance rarely given to African-American men: to tell his story before his peers instead of before a magistrate.