History 688
Readings in
Twentieth-Century U.S. History:
Urban
Crisis/Suburban Nation
Matt Lassiter
Office: 2513 Haven Hall
E-mail: mlassite@umich.edu
Fall 2007
Tues. 5-8 p.m.
2330 Mason Hall
Office Hours: Thurs. 2:00-4:00 p.m., and by appt.
This course is a graduate seminar in twentieth-century U.S. history, emphasizing a metropolitan approach to and a spatial analysis of the post-1940 period. The course begins with the three great migrations of mid-century America: black southerners to the North and West, white families to the suburbs, and political power and economic resources to the Sunbelt. We will then investigate processes of political transformation and economic restructuring, civil rights battles over school and housing integration, and policy debates over the inner-city "underclass," urban redevelopment, "theme-parking" cities, and suburban sprawl. From a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches, the readings probe the intersection of race, class, neighborhood, consumer culture, grassroots movements, public policies, and the "creative destruction" of capitalism in modern America. The title of the course is not intended to imply fixed categories in a metropolitan dichotomy, but instead the intertwined discourses of "urban crisis" and "suburban nation" that we will approach skeptically and investigate thoroughly.
Did the same policies that built the sprawling suburbs also produce the urban crisis? How does a metropolitan approach to postwar America recast historiographical debates about racial identity and class consciousness, public policy and political realignment, the rise and fall of the New Deal Order? Case studies of key cities and regions are interspersed with synthetic works and policy analyses that address topics such as the forging of urban and suburban political cultures; the postwar reconstruction of the "American Dream"; the power shift from Rust Belt to Sunbelt; the intersection of market forces, state policy, and grassroots movements in metropolitan space; and the emerging interdisciplinary "postsuburban" synthesis.
Discussion: The central obligation of this course involves thorough preparation for each weekly meeting and active participation in class discussion. Seminar participants will each serve as the discussion generator during one week of the semester. We will use CTools to stimulate thought and begin conversation about the weekly reading before the actual class meeting. CTools postings should be about one single-spaced page in length. The discussion generator should plan to launch the conversation with a posting on CTools no later than early Sunday afternoon. The goal of this initial response is not to summarize the book comprehensively but instead to pose a series of questions designed to place provocative ideas into the spotlight and/or draw connections among various weeks. The other students in the seminar should post their own weekly responses to the readings, which may include responses to the comments by the discussion generator and other course members, by Monday at 8 p.m. Everyone in the class should read over the entire CTools dialogue before class on Tuesday. Maintaining a record of your own notes and responses to the readings also should prove to be extremely useful when you begin to prepare for preliminary exams. The direct link to our CTools site:
<https://ctools.umich.edu/portal/site/14cdd2e5-6f78-41cf-00cb-df8929341afa >
Course Listserv: I have established a course listserv (history6882007@umich.edu) for announcements. Members of the seminar may use the listserv to forward information about events on campus, links to resources, and other items that would be of interest and relevance to class participants.
Metropolitan History Workshop: Four of the authors on the syllabus will be coming to campus this fall as part of the Metropolitan History Workshop designed for members of History 688 and other interested graduate students. The visitors include Margaret O'Mara (Sept. 14), Alison Isenberg (Sept. 28), David Freund (Nov. 9), and Howard Gillette (Dec. 7). The book workshops will be held on Fridays afternoons, times and locations TBA, with a social event following. Most of the visitors will also deliver a lecture or participate in a panel discussion. Updates regarding the Metropolitan History Workshop can be found here:
<http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mlassite/metro/metroworkshop.html>
Evaluations: The
course requirements include active and consistent participation in class
discussions, weekly postings on CTools, and a final paper that will require
additional reading and should explore a specific theme in urban/suburban
historiography, metropolitan policy, or a combination of both categories (15-20
pages). Guidelines for the final
paper will be posted on CTools and sent out via the course listserv in a timely
fashion.
**Discussion participation (60%)
**CTools postings and Final Paper (40%)
Reading Assignments: Seminar members are responsible for securing your own copies of the assigned books. One copy of each book also is on course reserve at the Shapiro Undergraduate Library. I have also placed two other texts on reserve for general reference: Michael B. Katz, ed., The "Underclass" Debate: Views from History; and John Charles Boger and Judith Welch Wegner, eds., Race, Poverty, and American Cities. A number of journal articles or book chapters are assigned in History 611. These are designated by [ER] on the syllabus and are available as pdf files or through other direct links through the library's Electronic Reserve. The direct link for the History 688 Electronic Reserve:
<http://www.lib.umich.edu/reserves/ures/lists/1/fa2007/fa2007HISTORY688mlassite.php>
Course
Outline
I. Political Economy
**Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985)
**Robert Fishman, "America's
New City: Megalopolis Unbound," Wilson Quarterly (Winter 1990), 25-45 [ER]
**Symposium: William Sharpe and
Leonard Wallock, "Bold New City or Built-Up 'Burb? Redefining Contemporary
Suburbia," with comments by Robert Bruegmann, Robert Fishman, Margaret
Marsh, and June Manning Thomas, American Quarterly 46 (March 1994), 1-61 [JSTOR]
**Margaret O'Mara, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (2005)
Week 3 (Sept. 18)Ñ Citizenship in a Consumer Nation
**Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of
Mass Consumption in Postwar America (2003)
**Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (2004)
**Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (1991) [chapters 1, 3-6, 8-9]
**Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (1999)
II. Political Culture
**Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996, new ed. 2005)
**Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (2003)
Oct 16--No Meeting: Fall Break
Week 7 (Oct. 23)ÑThe "Long Civil Rights
Movement"
**Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (2003)
**Jeanne Theoharis, "Introduction," in Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles outside the South, 1-16 [ER]
**Matthew Countryman, "'From Protest to Politics': Community Control and Black Independent Politics in Philadelphia, 1965-1984," Journal of Urban History (Sept. 2006), 813-861 [ER]
**Thomas Jackson, "The State, the Movement, and the
Urban Poor: The War on Poverty and Political Mobilization in the 1960s,"
in The "Underclass" Debate: Views from History, ed. Michael B. Katz, 403-39 [ER]
**Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (2001)
**Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban
Politics in the Sunbelt South (2006)
[introduction, chapters 5-12]
Week 9 (Nov. 6)ÑThe State and the Grassroots
**David Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (2007)
**J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Life of Three American Families (1985)
III. New Directions
Week 11 (Nov. 20)ÑRewriting Suburban History
**Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (2004)
**Sarah Mahler, "The Construction of Marginality" chapter 5 (105-137) and "The Encargado Industry" chapter 8 (188-213) in American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins [ER]
**Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (2001)
**Mike Davis, "Homegrown Revolution," in City of Quartz, 153-219 [ER]
**Robert Bullard, "Introduction" and "Anatomy of Environmental Racism and the Environmental Justice Movement," in Confronting Environmental Racism, 7-39 [ER]
Week 13 (Dec. 4)ÑUrban Renewal in the Rust Belt
**Howard Gillette, Camden after the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a Post-Industrial City (2005)
**Bryant Simon, Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America (2004)
**Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of
Cities and Regions (2000) [preface,
introduction, chapters 4, 6-11, 14]
Final Essay due: Dec. 21