Segregating Cities: An Arnold R. Hirsch Reader (Historical Studies of Urban America)

Collects critical essays by the author of Making the Second Ghetto.

Arnold R. Hirsch (1949–2018) was one of the preeminent urban historians of his generation, a reputation cemented by his landmark book, Making the Second Ghetto. With compelling clarity, Hirsch demonstrated that segregation is not the inevitable result of individual choices, natural tendencies, or cultural traits—it is a structural phenomenon, reinforced on every level by state power.

Segregating Cities collects the author’s key essays, some previously unpublished, to reveal a more complete picture of a remarkable scholar and his exploration of race, place, politics, and policy in the twentieth-century American city. Together, these essays can help us see segregation for what it is, so that we can then begin to truly work to overcome it.

Arnold R. Hirsch (1949–2018) was the Ethel and Herman L. Midlo Endowed Chair for New Orleans Studies at the University of New Orleans. The author of the influential Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960, Hirsch’s research showed how racism pervaded every stratum of American society.

Thomas J. Sugrue is the Julius Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. He is the author of Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North, and The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, as well as coauthor of These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present.