The Origins of the Urban Crisis - Hardcover

Sugrue, Thomas J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 069101101X ISBN 13: 9780691011011

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1996

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

"This superb study offers a richly detailed account of the rise and fall of twentieth-century Detroit.... Must reading for ... everyone concerned about the current urban crisis."--Jacqueline Jones, author of The Dispossessed: America's Underclass from the Civil War to the Present

"Sugrue's incredibly rich, nuanced, multilayered account of the transformation of Detroit provides the historical perspective missing in virtually all accounts of the crisis ravaging today's inner cities."--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class

About the Author:

Thomas J. Sugrue is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 069101101X
• ISBN 13: 9780691011011
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 408