Invented Cities

All but forgotten today, Five Points was once renowned the world over. Its handful of streets in lower Manhattan featured America's most wretched poverty, shared by Irish, Jewish, German, Italian, Chinese, and African Americans. It was the scene of more riots, scams, saloons, brothels, and drunkenness than any other neighborhood in the new world. The story that Anbinder tells is the classic tale of America's immigrant past, as successive waves of new arrivals fought for survival in a land that was as exciting as it was dangerous, as riotous as it was culturally rich.

In the seventh and eighth centuries AD, armies inspired by the new religion of Islam burst out of Arabia to subjugate the Levant, southwest Asia, North Africa and the Iberian peninsula. These Arab conquests followed immediately after the Prophet Mohammed's death in 632. By this time, against all the odds, he had managed to unite the feuding tribes of Arabia at the point of his sword. The Muslim conquests lasted until 750, by which time several generations of marauding Arab armies had carved out an Islamic empire which, in size and population, rivalled that of Rome at its zenith.

DAYTON: The City That Invented the Future is a raw, heartfelt, and sharply written portrait of one of America’s most important and misunderstood cities. From the Wright brothers to Funk music, from NCR to GM, from the Great Flood to the Oregon District, JJ walks through the neighborhoods, memories, machines, and people that made Dayton what it is. But this isn’t just a local history book. It’s personal. And it’s layered. Told through the eyes of someone who grew up here, it's part memoir, part diagnosis, and part love letter to a city that changed the world and got left behind in the process.