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"The story of how American banks helped disenfranchise nonwhite urbanities and condemn to blight the very neighborhoods that needed the most investment is infuriating. And yet, by digging into the history of urban finance, Rebecca Marchiel here illuminates how urban activists changed some banks' behavior to support investment in communities that they had once abandoned. These developments, in turn, affected federal urban policy and reshaped banks' understanding of the role that urban communities play in the financial system. The legacy of reinvestment activism is clouded, but Marchiel's detailing of it transforms our understanding of the history and significance of community/bank relations"--Provided by publisher.
An exploration of how the Windy City became a postwar Latinx metropolis in the face of white resistance. Though Chicago is often popularly defined by its Polish, Black, and Irish populations, Cook County is home to the third-largest Mexican-American population in the United States. The story of Mexican immigration and integration into the city is one of complex political struggles, deeply entwined with issues of housing and neighborhood control. In Making Mexican Chicago, Mike Amezcua explores how the Windy City became a Latinx metropolis in the second half of the twentieth century. In the decades after World War II, working-class Chicago neighborhoods like Pilsen and Little Village became s...
An exploration of how and why American city governments delegated the responsibility for solving urban inequality to the nonprofit sector. American cities are rife with nonprofit organizations that provide services ranging from arts to parks, and health to housing. These organizations have become so ubiquitous, it can be difficult to envision a time when they were fewer, smaller, and more limited in their roles. Turning back the clock, however, uncovers both an eye-opening story of how the nonprofit sector became such a dominant force in American society, as well as a troubling one of why this growth occurred alongside persistent poverty and widening inequality. Claire Dunning's book connect...
A groundbreaking look at the transformation of SoHo. American cities entered a new phase when, beginning in the 1950s, artists and developers looked upon a decaying industrial zone in Lower Manhattan and saw, not blight, but opportunity: cheap rents, lax regulation, and wide open spaces. Thus, SoHo was born. From 1960 to 1980, residents transformed the industrial neighborhood into an artist district, creating the conditions under which it evolved into an upper-income, gentrified area. Introducing the idea—still potent in city planning today—that art could be harnessed to drive municipal prosperity, SoHo was the forerunner of gentrified districts in cities nationwide, spawning the notion ...
A new edition of a classic work revealing the little-known history of African Americans in New York City before Emancipation. The popular understanding of the history of slavery in America almost entirely ignores the institution’s extensive reach in the North. But the cities of the North were built by—and became the home of—tens of thousands of enslaved African Americans, many of whom would continue to live there as free people after Emancipation. In the Shadow of Slavery reveals the history of African Americans in the nation’s largest metropolis, New York City. Leslie M. Harris draws on travel accounts, autobiographies, newspapers, literature, and organizational records to extend prior studies of racial discrimination. She traces the undeniable impact of African Americans on class distinctions, politics, and community formation by offering vivid portraits of the lives and aspirations of countless black New Yorkers. This new edition includes an afterword by the author addressing subsequent research and the ongoing arguments over how slavery and its legacy should be taught, memorialized, and acknowledged by governments.
"Los Angeles, often seen as the bulwark of progressive secular politics, is a place that values immigration, equity, diversity, and perhaps above all human rights. This worldview, Sean Dempsey says, originated with liberal Protestants and other engaged religious organizations in the postwar era, notably from the 1970s onward, even as the Religious Right rose. Progressive religious actors in Los Angeles promoted a global vision of human rights-based ethics that has changed both the city and the world. This "politics of dignity" draws on a number of theological and spiritual strands yet ultimately clarifies the commonalities that underlie a largely successful and humane urban ecosystem"--
"To Live Peaceably Together is a lively examination of the methods and accomplishments of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a primarily Quaker group that took a unique and influential approach to cultivating cultural acceptance of residential integration in America after World War II. K'Meyer offers a close study of how a social movement develops and wields influence, and how social activists do their work and why. Driven by detailed stories of activists and the obstacles they encountered, the book studies how a mostly white faith-based activist group worked to ally itself to a cause that demanded constant learning and reassessment. K'Meyer details the AFSC members' spiritual and humanist motivations, their understandings of segregation, their visions of integrated neighborhoods, as well as how their strategies changed as they came to better understand structural inequality, and how they were eventually adopted by other groups"--
How bankers created the modern consumer credit economy and destroyed financial stability in the process American households are awash in expensive credit card debt. But where did all this debt come from? In this history of the rise of postwar American finance, Sean H. Vanatta shows how bankers created our credit card economy and, with it, the indebted nation we know today. America’s consumer debt machine was not inevitable. In the years after World War II, state and federal regulations ensured that many Americans enjoyed safe banks and inexpensive credit. Bankers, though, grew restless amid restrictive rules that made profits scarce. They experimented with new services and new technologies...
Named one of the best nonfiction books of 2023 by Publishers Weekly! There is a familiar narrative about American suburbs: after 1945, white residents left cities for leafy, affluent subdivisions and the prosperity they seemed to embody. In Levittown’s Shadow tells us there’s more to this story, offering an eye-opening account of diverse, poor residents living and working in those same neighborhoods. Tim Keogh shows how public policies produced both suburban plenty and deprivation—and why ignoring suburban poverty doomed efforts to reduce inequality. Keogh focuses on the suburbs of Long Island, home to Levittown, often considered the archetypal suburb. Here military contracts subsidize...
"One of the most enduring American urban myths concerns the death of the Red Car Trolley, an extensive and equitable system in Los Angeles County that some say was weakened and then eradicated by US car manufacturers. Yet as Nicholas Dagen Bloom shows, an array of larger yet less tangible forces together interacted to practically murder public transportation of all kinds in cities nationwide. Most centrally, public transit collapsed because essentially we wanted it to-no conspiracy necessary. Detailing the histories of transportation in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco, Bloom seeks to set all of our transit myths to rest for the sake not only of accuracy but in order to enrich our conversations about public transportation funding today"--