Americas Urban History

Beneath the cobblestone streets and candlelit alleys of America’s oldest cities lie stories that never made it into the history books. Urban Legends of America’s Oldest Cities explores the whispered tales born alongside the nation itself—accounts of vanished settlers, sealed-off tunnels, cursed buildings, and crimes buried deeper than any archive. These are the stories passed quietly from generation to generation, shaped by fear, guilt, and the lingering presence of unfinished business. Each chapter focuses on a different historic city, uncovering legends rooted in colonial life, ...

In 1992, the deadliest year in Chicago’s history, seven-year-old Dantrell Davis was shot and killed in front of his elementary school inside the public housing complex Cabrini-Green. What happened to Dantrell led to a truce among Chicago’s gangs, but it also ignited a national panic about poverty and violence in America’s cities. Dantrell’s name would soon be used to demolish all of Chicago’s high-rise public housing, displacing tens of thousands of low-income families.

In the heart of America, a metropolis is quietly destroying itself. Detroit, once the richest city in the nation, is now its poorest. Once the vanguard of America’s machine age - mass production, automobiles, and blue-collar jobs - Detroit is now America’s capital for unemployment, illiteracy, foreclosure, and dropouts. With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark and the righteous indignation that only a native son can possess, journalist Charlie LeDuff sets out to uncover what has brought low this once-vibrant city, his city.

Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black Southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.

""With We Carry Their Bones, Erin Kimmerle continues to unearth the true story of the Dozier School, a tale more frightening than any fiction. In a corrupt world, her unflinching revelations are as close as we'll come to justice."" –Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer-Prize Winning author of The Nickel...

A groundbreaking and deeply personal exploration of Tribal enrollment, and what it means to be Native American in the United States “Candid, unflinching . . . Her thorough excavation of the painful history that gave rise to rigid enrollment policies is a courageous gift to our understanding of...

A Sweeping History of the Great State of Massachusetts From the Puritan vision of a "city upon a hill" to the gleaming biotech corridors of the twenty-first century, Massachusetts has wielded influence on American life wildly disproportionate to its size. This sweeping history reveals a state of profound contradictions—simultaneously provincial and cosmopolitan, fiercely idealistic yet repeatedly compromising its principles, a beacon of progress that has often betrayed its own values. Daniel Hardy traces four centuries of transformation: the Puritan theocracy that banished dissenters ...

By early 1977, New York City was in the grip of hysteria caused by a murderer dubbed "Son of Sam". And on a sweltering night in July, a citywide power outage touched off an orgy of looting and arson that led to the largest mass arrest in the city's history. As the turbulent year wore on, the city became absorbed in two epic battles: the fight between Yankee slugger Reggie Jackson and team manager Billy Martin, and the battle between Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo for the city's mayoralty.

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the 20th century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage.

Scientology is one of the wealthiest and most powerful new religions to emerge in the past century. To its detractors, L. Ron Hubbard's space-age mysticism is a moneymaking scam and sinister brainwashing cult. But to its adherents, it is humanity's brightest hope. Few religious movements have been subject to public scrutiny like Scientology, yet much of what is written about the church is sensationalist and inaccurate.

The Willie Lynch Letter and the Making of a Slave by Willie Lynch.

It was the street your mother warned you about - even if you lived in San Francisco. Long associated with skid row, saloons, freak shows, violence, and vice, the Bowery often showed the worst New York City had to offer. Yet there were times when it showed its best as well.

A Sweeping History of the Great State of New Jersey New Jersey has always been more than a place between New York and Philadelphia. From the Lenape who first inhabited its river valleys to the diverse communities that make it America's most multicultural state, New Jersey has served as a laboratory for the American experiment—pioneering industry, immigration, suburbanization, and environmental protection. The Garden State traces New Jersey's remarkable journey from Revolutionary battlefield to industrial powerhouse, from Ellis Island gateway to suburban frontier. Here are the stories of ...

As nature's largest and longest-lived creations, trees play an extraordinarily important role in our cities; they are living landmarks that define space, cool the air, soothe our psyches, and connect us to nature and our past. Jill Jonnes's Urban Forests tells the captivating stories of the founding mothers and fathers of urban forestry, in addition to those arboreal advocates presently using the latest technologies to illuminate the value of trees to public health and to our urban infrastructure.

A Sweeping History of The Great State of New York From the Haudenosaunee Confederacy to the gleaming towers of Manhattan, New York has been at the center of the American story for four centuries. This sweeping narrative traces how a Dutch trading post became the nation's indispensable state—shaping revolutions, building canals that opened a continent, welcoming waves of immigrants who transformed a nation, and creating the financial and cultural capital of the modern world. Through vivid storytelling and sharp analysis, The Empire State reveals how New York's history illuminates America's...

It is where Fidel Castro raised money to overthrow Batista and where two generations of Castro's enemies have raised armies to overthrow him, so far without success. It is where the bitter opera of Cuban exile intersects with the cynicism of U.S. foreign policy. It is a city whose skyrocketing murder rate is fueled by the cocaine trade, racial discontent, and an undeclared war on the island 90 miles to the south.

America's most storied urban underdog, Brooklyn has become an internationally recognized brand in recent decades - celebrated and scorned as one of the hippest destinations in the world. In Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, Thomas J. Campanella unearths long-lost threads of the urban past, telling the rich history of the rise, fall, and reinvention of one of the world’s most resurgent cities.

Salsa is one of the most popular types of music listened to and danced to in the United States. Until now, the single comprehensive history of the music - and the industry that grew up around it, including musicians, performances, styles, movements, and production - was available only in Spanish.

Though today it can seem as if all American culture comes out of New York and Los Angeles, much of what defined the nation as it grew into a superpower was produced in Chicago. Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to-coast journey included a stop there, and this flow of people and commodities made it America’s central clearinghouse, laboratory, and factory.

Journalist Julie Satow's thrilling, unforgettable history of how one illustrious hotel has defined our understanding of money and glamour, from the Gilded Age to the Go-Go Eighties to today's Billionaire Row. From the moment in 1907 when New York millionaire Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt strode...