In 1854, a group of engineers and railroad businessmen drew a straight line from Philadelphia to the New Jersey coast, built a railroad along the line, and created Atlantic City. From the 1850s to the 1950s, the city attracted the creme of American society and the working class alike and gave birth to the beauty pageant, rolling chair, boardwalk, saltwater taffy, jitney, and the successful Monopoly board game. But the onset of air travel in the 1950s and the aging grand hotels brought Atlantic City to its knees. The opening of Resorts International in 1978 and the prosperous gaming business that followed in its wake helped the city rise from its own ashes, and a year-round tourism industry exploded. Garish and opulent casino hotels replaced many of the boardwalk dowagers, and new palaces transformed the once desolate marina section into a vibrant destination.

A photographic history of Atlantic City, New Jersey, chronicles the city's early days as a premier seaside resort, its decline through the mid-twentieth century, and its twenty-first-century incarnation as an entertainment and gambling mecca, examining such landmarks as its famed boardwalk, its role as the birthplace of the Monopoly game and the Miss America pageant, and more.

During the first half of the twentieth century, Atlantic City was the nation's most popular middle-class resort--the home of the famed Boardwalk, the Miss America Pageant, and the board game Monopoly. By the late 1960s, it had become a symbol of urban decay and blight, compared by journalists to bombed-out Dresden and war-torn Beirut. Several decades and a dozen casinos later, Atlantic City is again one of America's most popular tourist spots, with thirty-five million visitors a year. Yet most stay for a mere six hours, and the highway has replaced the Boardwalk as the city's most important thoroughfare. Today the city doesn't have a single movie theater and its one supermarket is a virtual fortress protected by metal detectors and security guards. In this wide-ranging book, Bryant Simon does far more than tell a nostalgic tale of Atlantic City's rise, near death, and reincarnation. He turns the depiction of middle-class vacationers into a revealing discussion of the boundaries of public space in urban America. In the past, he argues, the public was never really about democracy, but about exclusion. During Atlantic City's heyday, African Americans were kept off the Boardwalk and away from the beaches. The overly boisterous or improperly dressed were kept out of theaters and hotel lobbies by uniformed ushers and police. The creation of Atlantic City as the "Nation's Playground" was dependent on keeping undesirables out of view unless they were pushing tourists down the Boardwalk on rickshaw-like rolling chairs or shimmying in smoky nightclubs. Desegregation overturned this racial balance in the mid-1960s, making the city's public spaces more open and democratic, too open and democratic for many middle-class Americans, who fled to suburbs and suburban-style resorts like Disneyworld. With the opening of the first casino in 1978, the urban balance once again shifted, creating twelve separate, heavily guarded, glittering casinos worlds walled off from the dilapidated houses, boarded-up businesses, and lots razed for redevelopment that never came. Tourists are deliberately kept away from the city's grim reality and its predominantly poor African American residents. Despite ten of thousands of buses and cars rolling into every day, gambling has not saved Atlantic City or returned it to its glory days. Simon's moving narrative of Atlantic City's past points to the troubling fate of urban America and the nation's cultural trajectory in the twentieth century, with broad implications for those interested in urban studies, sociology, planning, architecture, and history.

During the early years of Atlantic City (AC) boxing, the fight game was bustling. An array of ring talent, from club fighters to champions, came to the shore to compete at thriving venues like the Northside's Waltz Dream Arena and Convention Hall on the boardwalk. Although ring action was plentiful, the biggest fights were still happening elsewhere, and boxing was just one of many entertainment options in AC. However, everything changed once gambling came to town. As casinos popped up along the boardwalk, Atlantic City fights got bigger and bigger. By the late 1970s, boxing was on the rise, and within a few years, business was booming. Heavyweight champion Mike Tyson ushered in the city's peak era in the late 1980s, a time when more than just fight fans turned their attention to Atlantic City for some of the biggest sporting events ever. Although AC never again topped the impact of those days, boxing action at the shore remained vital for decades to come.

Few American resort cities rival the romantic slpendor of Atlantic City, New Jersey. Since 1854, this island has evoked dreams and memories of days lived amid white sand beaches, a vibrant boardwalk, exciting amusement piers, and grand hotels. For decades it was a place where teenagers fell in love, returned for honeymoons, and later brought families. Atlantic Cities is a nostalgic return to the pre-casino days that now seem relatively innocent. The founders believed that the city would become a grand health resort, featuring healthful sea breezes and balmy days. Nearly deserted when the first train loaded with day-trippers arrived on July 1, 1854, Atlantic City, by 1900, was known throughout much of the world as "The Queen of American Resorts." With huge hotels lining the Boardwalk and unique amusement piers jutting into the ocean, the city thrived on what one promoter called "ocean, emotion, and constant promotion." Those were the days when bathers frolicked on the beach in drab clothing, when the Boardwalk was alive with throngs of happy visitors, and Miss America actually strolled the Boardwalk amid the crowds. Images like those, and of course of the annual Easter Parade, one of the East Coast's premier social events, are among the nearly two hundred photographs carefully selected for this long-awaited book.

In 1854, a group of engineers and railroad businessmen drew a straight line from Philadelphia to the New Jersey coast, built a railroad along the line, and created Atlantic City. From the 1850s to the 1950s, the city attracted the creme of American society and the working class alike and gave birth to the beauty pageant, rolling chair, boardwalk, saltwater taffy, jitney, and the successful Monopoly board game. But the onset of air travel in the 1950s and the aging grand hotels brought Atlantic City to its knees. The opening of Resorts International in 1978 and the prosperous gaming business that followed in its wake helped the city rise from its own ashes, and a year-round tourism industry exploded. Garish and opulent casino hotels replaced many of the boardwalk dowagers, and new palaces transformed the once desolate marina section into a vibrant destination.

Nicknamed both “Mobtown” and “Charm City” and located on the border of the North and South, Baltimore is a city of contradictions. From media depictions in The Wire to the real-life trial of police officers for the murder of Freddie Gray, Baltimore has become a quintessential example of a struggling American city. Yet the truth about Baltimore is far more complicated—and more fascinating. To help untangle these apparent paradoxes, the editors of Baltimore Revisited have assembled a collection of over thirty experts from inside and outside academia. Together, they reveal that Baltimore has been ground zero for a slew of neoliberal policies, a place where inequality has increased as corporate interests have eagerly privatized public goods and services to maximize profits. But they also uncover how community members resist and reveal a long tradition of Baltimoreans who have fought for social justice. The essays in this collection take readers on a tour through the city’s diverse neighborhoods, from the Lumbee Indian community in East Baltimore to the crusade for environmental justice in South Baltimore. Baltimore Revisited examines the city’s past, reflects upon the city’s present, and envisions the city’s future.

Provides a historical perspective for understanding the exponential growth of casinos in the United States since 1990, by telling the story of Atlantic City, New Jersey since the 1970s. This work uses oral history to focus on the human stories of the region in addition to the broader story of economic and social impacts.

Winner of the Popular Culture Association’s Emily Toth Best Book in Women’s Studies Award From an author praised for writing “delicious social history” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times) comes a lively account of memorable Miss America contestants, protests, and scandals—and how the pageant, now in its one hundredth year, serves as an unintended indicator of feminist progress Looking for Miss America is a fast–paced narrative history of a curious and contradictory institution. From its start in 1921 as an Atlantic City tourist draw to its current incarnation as a scholarship competition, the pageant has indexed women’s status during periods of social change—the post–suffrage 1920s, the Eisenhower 1950s, the #MeToo era. This ever–changing institution has been shaped by war, evangelism, the rise of television and reality TV, and, significantly, by contestants who confounded expectations. Spotlighting individuals, from Yolande Betbeze, whose refusal to pose in swimsuits led an angry sponsor to launch the rival Miss USA contest, to the first black winner, Vanessa Williams, who received death threats and was protected by sharpshooters in her hometown parade, Margot Mifflin shows how women made hard bargains even as they used the pageant for economic advancement. The pageant’s history includes, crucially, those it excluded; the notorious Rule Seven, which required contestants to be “of the white race,” was retired in the 1950s, but no women of color were crowned until the 1980s. In rigorously researched, vibrant chapters that unpack each decade of the pageant, Looking for Miss America examines the heady blend of capitalism, patriotism, class anxiety, and cultural mythology that has fueled this American ritual.