Suburb Reader

Becky M. Nicolaides is an Affiliated Research Scholar at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, a Research Affiliate at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, and the author of My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965.Andrew Wiese is Professor of History at San Diego State University and the author of Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century.

• Part I: The Emergence of Suburbia 1750-1940Chapter 1. The Transnational Origins of the Elite Suburb Chapter 2. Family and Gender in the Making of SuburbiaChapter 3. Technology and Decentralization Chapter 4. Economic and Class Diversity on the Early Suburban FringeChapter 5. The Politics of Early Suburbia Chapter 6. Imagining Suburbia: Visions and Plans from the Turn of the Century Chapter 7. The Other Suburbanites: class, racial, & ethnic diversity in early suburbia Chapter 8. The Tools of Exclusion: From Local Initiatives to Federal Policy Part II: Postwar Suburbia 1940-1970Chapter 9. Postwar America: Suburban Apotheosis Chapter 10. Culture Wars: Polarized Constructions of Suburban Life Chapter 11.Postwar Suburbs and the Construction of RaceChapter 12. The City-Suburb Divide Part III: Recent Suburbia, 1970 to the PresentChapter 13. The Political Culture of Suburbia Chapter 14. Suburban Transformations Since 1970Chapter 15. Economic and Class TransformationsChapter 16. Our Town: Enduring Exclusion in Recent SuburbiaChapter 17. The Future of Suburbia

The Suburb Reader is the essential guide to the history of the world’s first suburban nation. Nicolaides and Wiese have assembled an extraordinary collection of documents, illustrations, and maps, augmented with well-chosen essays by field-defining scholars. I can’t wait to teach this book.—Thomas J. Sugrue, Kahn Professor of History and Sociology, University of PennsylvaniaThis fabulous collection brings together richly textured documents and classic scholarly essays to illuminate how the United States became a suburban nation. Ideally suited for students, scholars, and general readers, the book includes multiple views of the suburbs—pro and con—and delves deeply into issues of race, class, gender, and politics. The Suburb Reader enriches our understanding not only of suburbia, but of America itself. —Elaine Tyler May, author of Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era