Urban America in Transformation analyzes the changing federal system of urban policy making as an evolving complex of interorganizational networks and relates it to the restructuring of American urbanism over the past half century. Comparing the major perspectives (ecological and Marxist), the book provides a thorough review of the evolution of the urban policy system in the 20th century, and explores its significance for the postindustrial transition of older big cities. This book is timely and innovative in its approach and suggests a new method of analyzing the federal system of urban-related policy making. Advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars in policy studies, political science, sociology, and urban planning will find this book to be an innovative and valuable contribution to the field.

This second edition is designed to introduce students of urban history to recent interpretive literature in this field. Its goal is to provide a coherent framework for understanding the pattern of American urbanization, while at the same time offering specific examples of the work of historians in the field.

Supersizing Urban America reveals how the US government has been, and remains, a major contributor to America s obesity epidemic. Government policies, targeted food industry advertising, and other factors helped create and reinforce fast food consumption in America s urban communities. Historian Chin Jou uncovers how predominantly African-American neighborhoods went from having no fast food chains to being deluged. She lays bare the federal policies that helped to subsidize the expansion of the fast food industry in America s cities and explains how fast food companies have deliberately and relentlessly marketed to urban, African-American consumers. These developments are a significant factor in why Americans, especially those in urban, low-income, minority communities, have become disproportionately affected by the obesity epidemic."

The second edition of Urban America, like the first edition, is distinguished by its emphasis on the spatial relationships within and between cities. This emphasis a study of the geographical patterns of residential, commercial, political, and cultural development, allows a balanced, flexible examination of the varied aspects of urban life. It permits a comprehensive look at the social, economic, political, and cultural history of the city. At the same time, this edition minimizes its review of spatial theory; many students and instructors told us the theoretical material tended to encumber rather than enlighten. -- Preface.

First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The revised and updated third edition of The Making of Urban America includes seven new articles and a richly detailed historiographical essay that discusses the vast urban history literature added to the canon since the publication of the second edition. The authors’ extensively revised introductions and the fifteen reprinted articles trace urban development from the preindustrial city to the twentieth-century city. With emphasis on the social, economic, political, commercial, and cultural aspects of urban history, these essays illustrate the growth and change that created modern-day urban life. Dynamic topics such as technology, immigration and ethnicity, suburbanization, sunbelt cities, urban political history, and planning and housing are examined. The Making of Urban America is the only reader available that covers all of U.S. urban history and that also includes the most recent interpretive scholarship on the subject.

Archaeology of Urban America: The Search for Pattern and Process is composed of three parts, namely, Strategies and Methods; Site Formation, Structure, and Pattern; and Artifact Analysis and Interpretation. The Strategies and Methods section centers on the general questions asked by urban archaeologists, as well as on the ways they design their research to elucidate those questions. The Site Formation, Structure, and Pattern section is generally comprised of chapters classified as ""test cases"" emphasizing the approaches, interpretation, and even direct extension of larger research designs. Lastly, the Artifact Analysis and Interpretation section deals with intersite and intrasite patterning of artifact assemblages, as well as with specific class of artifacts. This material will help stimulate a dialogue among archaeologists who have chosen the American city as their subject. This book will also be useful to urban sociologists, economists, cultural anthropologists, and historians.

Since the appearance of Urban America in the Modern Age in 1987, the study of American cities has flourished. In this long-awaited second edition, Carl Abbott draws on the recent works of historians who have explored issues of urban growth, municipal politics, immigration and ethnicity, “suburbanization,” and environmental change. The fascination with growth and change in the nation’s metropolitan areas spans a wide range of scholarly fields, and the new edition also benefits from scholarship in disciplines closely related to urban history, including geography, political science, sociology, and urban planning. Featuring an entirely new chapter covering the years since 1980 and a bank of interesting photographs, the second edition of Urban America in the Modern Age further explores and fine-tunes the themes and topics central to its predecessor—the physical form of metropolitan areas, their sources of growth and mix of ethnic and racial groups, the shaping of and responses to public policy, and ideas of community planning. Regionally balanced—with examples from New York, Boston, and Chicago, as well as Los Angeles, Atlanta, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, San Antonio, Miami, Charlotte, Washington, Detroit, and Cleveland—the second edition of Urban America in the Modern Age makes ideal supplementary reading for courses in Urban History, twentieth-century America, as well as the second half of the U.S. survey.