HIST 209: Civil Rights in the United States
A bibliography of resources for studying the social and racial implications of urban and regional planning in the United States.
Suburban Erasure
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Suburban Erasure
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Publication Date: 2012For generations, historians believed that the study of the African-American experience centered on the questions about the processes and consequences of enslavement. Even after this phase passed, the modern Civil Rights Movement took center stage and filled hundreds of pages, creating a new framework for understanding both the history of the United States and of the world. Suburban Erasure by Walter David Greason contributes to the most recent developments in historical writing by recovering dozens of previously undiscovered works about the African-American experience in New Jersey. More importantly, his interpretation of these documents complicates the traditional understandings about the Great Migration, civil rights activism, and the transformation of the United States as a global, economic superpower.
Books
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American Apartheid
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This powerful and disturbing book clearly links persistent poverty among blacks in the United States to the unparalleled degree of deliberate segregation they experience in American cities. American Apartheid shows how the black ghetto was created by whites during the first half of the twentieth century in order to isolate growing urban black populations. It goes on to show that, despite the Fair Housing Act of 1968, segregation is perpetuated today through an interlocking set of individual actions, institutional practices, and governmental policies. In some urban areas the degree of black segregation is so intense and occurs in so many dimensions simultaneously that it amounts to hyper-segregation.
Call Number: MAC Stacks - Level 4 E185.61 .M373 1993 Other Editions and Formats atISBN: 1Publication Date: 1998 -
Boardwalk of Dreams
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During the first half of the twentieth century, Atlantic City was the nation's most popular middle-class resort--the home of the famed Boardwalk, the Miss America Pageant, and the board game Monopoly. By the late 1960s, it had become a symbol of urban decay and blight, compared by journalists to bombed-out Dresden and war-torn Beirut. Several decades and a dozen casinos later, Atlantic City is again one of America's most popular tourist spots, with thirty-five million visitors a year. Yet most stay for a mere six hours, and the highway has replaced the Boardwalk as the city's most important thoroughfare. Today the city doesn't have a single movie theater and its one supermarket is a virtual fortress protected by metal detectors and security guards. In this wide-ranging book, Bryant Simon does far more than tell a nostalgic tale of Atlantic City's rise, near death, and reincarnation. He turns the depiction of middle-class vacationers into a revealing discussion of the boundaries of public space in urban America. In the past, he argues, the public was never really about democracy, but about exclusion. During Atlantic City's heyday, African Americans were kept off the Boardwalk and away from the beaches. The overly boisterous or improperly dressed were kept out of theaters and hotel lobbies by uniformed ushers and police. The creation of Atlantic City as the "Nation's Playground" was dependent on keeping undesirables out of view unless they were pushing tourists down the Boardwalk on rickshaw-like rolling chairs or shimmying in smoky nightclubs. Desegregation overturned this racial balance in the mid-1960s, making the city's public spaces more open and democratic, too open and democratic for many middle-class Americans, who fled to suburbs and suburban-style resorts like Disneyworld. With the opening of the first casino in 1978, the urban balance once again shifted, creating twelve separate, heavily guarded, glittering casinos worlds walled off from the dilapidated houses, boarded-up businesses, and lots razed for redevelopment that never came. Tourists are deliberately kept away from the city's grim reality and its predominantly poor African American residents. Despite ten of thousands of buses and cars rolling into every day, gambling has not saved Atlantic City or returned it to its glory days."
Call Number: MAC Stacks - Level 4 F144.A8 S57 2004Publication Date: 2006 -
Camden after the Fall
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Looking at the cumulative effects of urban decline in the classic post-industrial city of Camden, New Jersey, historian Howard Gillette, Jr., probes the interaction of politics, economic restructuring, and racial bias to evaluate contemporary efforts at revitalization. In a sweeping analysis, Gillette identifies a number of related factors to explain this phenomenon, including the corrosive effects of concentrated poverty, environmental injustice, and a political bias that favors suburban amenity over urban reconstruction
Call Number: MAC Stacks - Level 4 F144.C2 G55 2005Publication Date: 2005 -
A Consumers' Republic
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A social and political history describes how mass consumption and the pursuit of prosperity transformed American life during the second half of the twentieth century.
Call Number: MAC Stacks - Level 4 HC110.C6 C537 2003Publication Date: 2003 -
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A Geography of New Jersey
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New Jersey is "the city in the garden." It is a bundle of paradoxes - a highly industrialized state famous for its seashore and mountain resorts; a fairly conservative state politically that nonetheless pioneered state land use, zoning, and environmental protection legislation. The only state to be characterized by the U.S. Census as entirely metropolitan, New Jersey has the highest population density in the nation. It is a highly suburbanized state that remains important agriculturally, one in which both very large and very small farms continue to multiply. New Jersey is also a state in which widespread suburbanization of residents, shopping, and jobs has affected the most remote corners but in which old central cities are being revitalized by massive immigration which is demographically and dramatically changing the face of the state. New Jersey should be understood as both a microcosm of the United States and a leading indicator of things to come for the nation.
Call Number: eBookPublication Date: 1998 -
The History of Sexuality
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Michel Foucault's 'The History of Sexuality' pioneered queer theory. In it he builds an argument grounded in a historical analysis of the word "sexuality" against the common thesis that sexuality always has been repressed in Western society. Quite the contrary: since the 17th century, there has been a fixation with sexuality creating a discourse around sexuality. It is this discourse that has created sexual minorities. In 'The History of Sexuality', Foucault attempts to disprove the thesis that Western society has seen a repression of sexuality since the 17th century and that sexuality has been unmentionable, something impossible to speak about. In the 70s, when the book was written, the sexual revolution was a fact. The ideas of the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, saying that to conserve your mental health you needed to liberate your sexual energy, were popular. The past was seen as a dark age where sexuality had been something forbidden.
Call Number: MAC Stacks - Level 4 HQ12 .F6813 1990 v.1Publication Date: 1990 -
Jim Crow Nostalgia
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In the Jim Crow era of the early twentieth century, Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood on the city's South Side was a major center of African American cultural vitality and a destination for thousands of Southern blacks seeking new opportunities in the North during the Great Migration. After decades of decline, the 1980s saw several community organizations in the neighborhood collaborating on a revitalization plan called "Restoring Bronzeville," envisioning an idealized version of the neighborhood as it had thrived during segregation. Opening with a description by a Bronzeville tour guide, wis.
Call Number: eBookPublication Date: 2008 -
The Last Resort
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An expose of the country's most fabulous 'social glamour spots' (circa 1950). The story of the Berkshires, Saratoga, Newport, & other famous resorts & the rich and famous who stayed there
Call Number: MAC Stacks - Level 4 E168 .A52Publication Date: 1952 -
Where Cities Meet: The Urbanization of New Jersey
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Call Number: Available through Interlibrary LoanPublication Date: 1964 -
Our Town
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An account of the legal battle to open up New Jersey's suburbs to the poor, looking at the views of lawyers on both sides of the controversy. It is a case study of judicial activism and its consequences and an analysis of suburban attitudes regarding race, class and property.
Call Number: MAC Stacks - Level 4 HD7288.76 .U52 M685 1995ISBN: 9780813524566Publication Date: 1997 -
Places of Their Own
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Tracing the contours of black migration to the suburbs over the course of the whole last century and across the entire United States, Places of Their Own will be a foundational book for anyone interested in the African American experience or the role of race and class in the making of America's suburbs.
Call Number: MAC Stacks - Level 4 E185.86 .W436 2003Publication Date: 2005 -
The Modern American Metropolis
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The Modern American Metropolis: A Documentary Reader introduces the history of American cities and suburbs through a collection of original source materials that historians have long used to make sense of the urban experience. It carefully integrates and juxtaposes the primary sources that are at the heart of the collection, and revisits and compares issues and themes over time. This book explores a wide variety of topics, including infrastructure development, electoral politics, consumer culture, battles over rights, environmental change, and the meaning of citizenship.
Call Number: Available through Interlibrary LoanPublication Date: 2015 -
Sweet Land of Liberty
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Sweet Land of Liberty is an epic, revelatory account of the abiding quest for justice in states from Illinois to New York, and of how the intense northern struggle differed from and was inspired by the fight down South.
Call Number: eBookPublication Date: 2008 -
Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North
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Focusing on the development of a single African American community in eastern New Jersey, Hodges examines the experience of slavery and freedom in the rural north. This unique social history addresses many long held assumptions about the experience of slavery and emancipation outside the south. For example, by tracing the process by which whites maintained "a durable architecture of oppression" and a rigid racial hierarchy, it challenges the notions that slavery was milder and that racial boundaries were more permeable in the north.
Call Number: MAC Stacks - Level 4 F142.M7 H66 1997Publication Date: 1997
