A Nation of Neighborhoods: Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar America By Benjamin Looker

Abstract

Nations are moral geographies, their identities criss-crossed by spatial divisions. In the United States, a civil war was fought over “Southern” slavery. During the early twentieth century, the burgeoning industrial cities corrupted rural youth, and, through the 1960s, declining cities dragged the now-suburban nation into chaos. The national debates of the time pivoted on place and its meaning. Today, gay residential enclaves, immigrant communities, and the racially-inflected ‘hood undermine a sense that we are “one people,” while muddling what it means to live decently in affluent America.