20th century
A01=Benjamin Looker
american
Author_Benjamin Looker
broadway shows
Category=JBSD
Category=NHK
catholicism
christianity
cities
class
community
cultural studies
democracy
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnography
feminism
gender
great society
historical
history
identity
individualism
men and women
neighborhood
physical space
pluralism
political
politics
postwar
presidential elections
privatization
radio plays
real estate
religion
sociology
towns
united states of america
urban spaces
usa
Product details
- ISBN 9780226290317
- Weight: 652g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 22 Oct 2015
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Despite the pundits who have written its epitaph and the latter-day refugees who have fled its confines for the half-acre suburban estate, the city neighborhood has endured as an idea central to American culture. In A Nation of Neighborhoods, Benjamin Looker presents us with the city neighborhood as both an endless problem and a possibility. Looker investigates the cultural, social, and political complexities of the idea of "neighborhood" in postwar America and how Americans grappled with vast changes in their urban spaces from World War II to the Reagan era. In the face of urban decline, competing visions of the city neighborhood's significance and purpose became proxies for broader debates over the meaning and limits of American democracy. By studying the way these contests unfolded across a startling variety of genres-Broadway shows, radio plays, urban ethnographies, real estate documents, and even children's programming-Looker shows that the neighborhood ideal has functioned as a central symbolic site for advancing and debating theories about American national identity and democratic practice.
Benjamin Looker teaches in the American Studies Department at Saint Louis University. He is the author of "Point from Which Creation Begins": The Black Artists' Group of St. Louis.
