Thomas J. Sugrue

Once America's "arsenal of democracy," Detroit over the last fifty years has become the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of racial and economic inequality in modern America, Thomas Sugrue explains how Detroit and many other once prosperous industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty. He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures of the 1960s. Probing beneath the veneer of 1950s prosperity and social consensus, Sugrue traces the rise of a new ghetto, solidified by changes in the urban economy and labor market and by racial and class segregation. In this provocative revision of postwar American history, Sugrue finds cities already fiercely divided by race and devastated by the exodus of industries. He focuses on urban neighborhoods, where white working-class homeowners mobilized to prevent integration as blacks tried to move out of the crumbling and overcrowded inner city. Weaving together the history of workplaces, unions, civil rights groups, political organizations, and real estate agencies, Sugrue finds the roots of today's urban poverty in a hidden history of racial violence, discrimination, and deindustrialization that reshaped the American urban landscape after World War II. In a new preface, Sugrue discusses the ongoing legacies of the postwar transformation of urban America and engages recent scholars who have joined in the reassessment of postwar urban, political, social, and African American history.

Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit

The Origins of the Urban Crisis

America has become a nation of suburbs. Confronting the popular image of suburbia as simply a refuge for affluent whites, The New Suburban History rejects the stereotypes of a conformist and conflict-free suburbia. The seemingly calm streets of suburbia were, in fact, battlegrounds over race, class, and politics. With this collection, Kevin Kruse and Thomas Sugrue argue that suburbia must be understood as a central factor in the modern American experience. Kruse and Sugrue here collect ten essays—augmented by their provocative introduction—that challenge our understanding of suburbia. Drawing from original research on suburbs across the country, the contributors recast important political and social issues in the context of suburbanization. Their essays reveal the role suburbs have played in the transformation of American liberalism and conservatism; the contentious politics of race, class, and ethnicity; and debates about the environment, land use, and taxation. The contributors move the history of African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and blue-collar workers from the margins to the mainstream of suburban history. From this broad perspective, these innovative historians explore the way suburbs affect—and are affected by—central cities, competing suburbs, and entire regions. The results, they show, are far-reaching: the emergence of a suburban America has reshaped national politics, fostered new social movements, and remade the American landscape. The New Suburban History offers nothing less than a new American history—one that claims the nation cannot be fully understood without a history of American suburbs at its very center.

The New Suburban History

Sweet Land of Liberty is Thomas J. Sugrue’s epic account of the abiding quest for racial equality in states from Illinois to New York, and of how the intense northern struggle differed from and was inspired by the fight down South. Sugrue’s panoramic view sweeps from the 1920s to the present–more than eighty of the most decisive years in American history. He uncovers the forgotten stories of battles to open up lunch counters, beaches, and movie theaters in the North; the untold history of struggles against Jim Crow schools in northern towns; the dramatic story of racial conflict in northern cities and suburbs; and the long and tangled histories of integration and black power. Filled with unforgettable characters and riveting incidents, and making use of information and accounts both public and private, such as the writings of obscure African American journalists and the records of civil rights and black power groups, Sweet Land of Liberty creates an indelible history.

The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North

Sweet Land of Liberty

Robert Polidori

Yves Marchand

Romain Meffre

Until the 1960s, Detroit was one of America's most important cities, a hub of industry with a population of almost two million and a skyline to rival that of any U.S. city. Its buildings were monuments to its success and vitality in the first half of the twentieth century. At the start of the twenty-first century, those same monuments are now ruins: the United Artists Theater, the Whitney Building, the Farwell Building and the once ravishing Michigan Central Station (unused since 1988) today look as if a bomb had dropped on Motor City, leaving behind the ruins of a once great civilization. In a series of weekly photographic bulletins for Time magazine called "Detroit's Beautiful, Horrible Decline," photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have been revealing to an astonished America the scale of decay in Detroit. "The state of ruin is essentially a temporary situation that happens at some point, the volatile result of change of era and the fall of empires," write Marchand and Meffre. "Photography appeared to us as a modest way to keep a little bit of this ephemeral state." As Detroit's white middle class continues to abandon the city center for its dispersed suburbs, and its downtown high-rises empty out, these astounding images, which convey both the imperious grandeur of the city's architecture and its genuinely shocking decline, preserve a moment that warns us all of the transience of great epochs.

The Ruins of Detroit

Michael B. Katz

"There is unanimity among these historians and sociologists in ascribing seminal importance to The Philadelphia Negro."—David Levering Lewis, Journal of American History

"The Philadelphia Negro" and Its Legacy

W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and the City

Andrew J. Diamond

Traces decades of troubled attempts to fund private answers to public urban problems The American city has long been a laboratory for austerity, governmental decentralization, and market-based solutions to urgent public problems such as affordable housing, criminal justice, and education. Through richly told case studies from Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and New York, Neoliberal Cities provides the necessary context to understand the always intensifying racial and economic inequality in and around the city center. In this original collection of essays, urban historians and sociologists trace the role that public policies have played in reshaping cities, with particular attention to labor, the privatization of public services, the collapse of welfare, the rise of gentrification, the expansion of the carceral state, and the politics of community control. In so doing, Neoliberal Cities offers a bottom-up approach to social scientific, theoretical, and historical accounts of urban America, exploring the ways that activists and grassroots organizations, as well as ordinary citizens, came to terms with new market-oriented public policies promoted by multinational corporations, financial institutions, and political parties. Neoliberal Cities offers new scaffolding for urban and metropolitan change, with attention to the interaction between policymaking, city planning, social movements, and the market.

The Remaking of Postwar Urban America

Neoliberal Cities

Caitlin Zaloom

Some years—1789, 1929, 1989—change the world suddenly. Or do they? In 2020, a pandemic converged with an economic collapse, inequalities exploded, and institutions weakened. Yet these crises sprang not from new risks but from known dangers. The world—like many patients—met 2020 with a host of preexisting conditions, which together tilted the odds toward disaster. Perhaps 2020 wasn’t the year the world changed; perhaps it was simply the moment the world finally understood its deadly diagnosis. In The Long Year, some of the world’s most incisive thinkers excavate 2020’s buried crises, revealing how they must be confronted in order to achieve a more equal future. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls for the defunding of police and the refunding of communities; Keisha Blain demonstrates why the battle against racism must be global; and Adam Tooze reveals that COVID-19 hit hardest where inequality was already greatest and welfare states weakest. Yarimar Bonilla, Xiaowei Wang, Simon Balto, Marcia Chatelain, Gautam Bhan, Ananya Roy, and others offer insights from the factory farms of China to the elite resorts of France, the meatpacking plants of the Midwest to the overcrowded hospitals of India. The definitive guide to these ongoing catastrophes, The Long Year shows that only by exposing the roots and ramifications of 2020 can another such breakdown be prevented. It is made possible through institutional partnerships with Public Books and the Social Science Research Council.

A 2020 Reader

The Long Year

Domenic Vitiello

After decades of urban crisis, American cities and suburbs have revived, thanks largely to immigration. This is the first book to explore the phenomenon, from big cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, to newer destinations such as Nashville and suburban Boston and New Jersey.

Immigration and Metropolitan Revitalization in the United States

In The Long Year, some of the world's most incisive thinkers excavate 2020's buried crises, revealing how they must be confronted in order to achieve a more equal future.

The paradox of racial inequality in Barack Obama's America Barack Obama, in his acclaimed campaign speech discussing the troubling complexities of race in America today, quoted William Faulkner's famous remark "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past." In Not Even Past, award-winning historian Thomas Sugrue examines the paradox of race in Obama's America and how President Obama intends to deal with it. Obama's journey to the White House undoubtedly marks a watershed in the history of race in America. Yet even in what is being hailed as the post-civil rights era, racial divisions—particularly between blacks and whites—remain deeply entrenched in American life. Sugrue traces Obama's evolving understanding of race and racial inequality throughout his career, from his early days as a community organizer in Chicago, to his time as an attorney and scholar, to his spectacular rise to power as a charismatic and savvy politician, to his dramatic presidential campaign. Sugrue looks at Obama's place in the contested history of the civil rights struggle; his views about the root causes of black poverty in America; and the incredible challenges confronting his historic presidency. Does Obama's presidency signal the end of race in American life? In Not Even Past, a leading historian of civil rights, race, and urban America offers a revealing and unflinchingly honest assessment of the culture and politics of race in the age of Obama, and of our prospects for a postracial America.

Barack Obama and the Burden of Race

Not Even Past

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore

President Franklin Roosevelt told Americans in a 1936 fireside chat, “I do not look upon these United States as a finished product. We are still in the making.” These United States builds on this foundation to present a readable, accessible history of the United States throughout the twentieth century—an ongoing and inspiring story of great leaders and everyday citizens marching, fighting, voting, and legislating to make the nation’s promise of democracy a reality for all Americans. In the college edition of These United States, Gilmore and Sugrue seamlessly weave insightful analysis with all of the support tools needed by students and instructors alike, including paired primary source documents, review questions, key terms, maps, and figures in a dynamic four-color design.

Thomas J. Sugrue

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