The Stalingrad battle and the Leningrad siege were just two of the brutal, devastating urban conflicts that marked the awful struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War. The cities were strategic fixed points in the sweeping advances and retreats of the opposing armies across eastern Europe. Yet no one has concentrated on these city battles before or has sought to tell the story of the campaigns through the fighting that took place in and around them. That is Anthony Tucker-Jones’s purpose in this concise and vivid history of the urban war on the Eastern Front. Early in the war, during the Wehrmacht’s crushing offensives of 1941 and 1942, the Red Army was forced out of a series of key cities. Moscow was threatened, Leningrad surrounded. Then, after the climactic battle at Stalingrad, the Red Army with increasing confidence, speed and power drove the Germans from the Soviet and East European capitals they had occupied. The final urban battles were fought in Germany's cities, culminating in Berlin. As he traces the course of the fighting for each city, Anthony Tucker-Jones looks at the local circumstances, the opposing forces, the strategic significance and the tactics employed. He focuses not only on the destruction and cruelty of such warfare, but on the heroism displayed on both sides and on the fate of the civilians who found themselves on the front line.

Warfare in the twenty-first century goes well beyond conventional armies and nation-states. In a world of diffuse conflicts taking place across sprawling cities, war has become fragmented and uneven to match its settings. Yet the analysis of failed states, civil war, and state building rarely considers the city, rather than the country, as the terrain of battle. In Cities at War, Mary Kaldor and Saskia Sassen assemble an international team of scholars to examine cities as sites of contemporary warfare and insecurity. Reflecting Kaldor’s expertise on security cultures and Sassen’s perspective on cities and their geographies, they develop new insight into how cities and their residents encounter instability and conflict, as well as the ways in which urban forms provide possibilities for countering violence. Through a series of case studies of cities including Baghdad, Bogotá, Ciudad Juarez, Kabul, and Karachi, the book reveals the unequal distribution of insecurity as well as how urban capabilities might offer resistance and hope. Through analyses of how contemporary forms of identity, inequality, and segregation interact with the built environment, Cities at War explains why and how political violence has become increasingly urbanized. It also points toward the capacity of the city to shape a different kind of urban subjectivity that can serve as a foundation for a more peaceful and equitable future.

A “witty, entertaining, educational” blend of travel memoir and Civil War history (Scott L. Mingus, Sr, award-winning author of Flames beyond Gettysburg). Gettysburg is a small, charming city nestled in south central Pennsylvania—but its very name evokes passion and angst, enthusiasm and sadness. For about half the year its streets are mainly empty, its businesses quiet, the weather cold and blustery. For the other months, however, the place teems with hundreds of thousands of visitors, bustling streets and shops, and more than a handful of unique larger-than-life characters. And then, of course, there is the Civil War battle that raged there during the first days of July 1863 at the price of more than 50,000 casualties. Its monuments and guns and plaques tell the story of the colossal clash of arms and societies, just as its National Cemetery bears silent witness to at least part of the cost of that bloody event. Yet, the author explains, he did not fully appreciate the profound meaning of this mammoth battle, its influential characters (living and dead), its deep meaning to our society, until he visited this hallowed ground in person. In this travelogue, you can join him at a host of famous and off-the-beaten-path places on the battlefield, explore the historic town as it is today, and learn fascinating facts and stories. Also included are maps and caricatures provided by award-winning cartoonist Tim Hartman.

Classic work of reportage documents life of the urban poor at the turn of the century. Real-life tales and rare photographs celebrate efforts to demolish breeding grounds of crime and improve conditions in schools and tenements.

When we talk about the Civil War, it is often with references to battles like Antietam, Gettysburg, Bull Run, and, perhaps most tellingly, the Battle of the Wilderness, which all took place in the countryside or in small towns. Part of the reason this picture has persisted is that few of the historians who have studied the war have been urban historians, even though cities hosted, enabled, and shaped southern society as much as in the North. The essays in Andrew Slap and Frank Towers s collection seek to shift the focus from the agrarian economy that undergirded the South to the cities that served as its political and administrative hubs. By demanding a more holistic reading of the South, this collection speaks to contemporary Civil War scholars and classrooms alike not least in providing surprisingly fresh perspectives on a well-studied war."

In 2008, U.S. and Iraqi forces defeated an uprising in Sadr City, a district of Baghdad with ~2.4 million residents. Coalition forces’ success in this battle helped consolidate the Government of Iraq’s authority, contributing significantly to the attainment of contemporary U.S. operational objectives in Iraq. U.S. forces’ conduct of the battle illustrates a new paradigm for urban combat and indicates capabilities the Army will need in the future.

In the 1960s Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood was labeled America’s largest ghetto. But its brownstones housed a coterie of black professionals intent on bringing order and hope to the community. In telling their story Michael Woodsworth reinterprets the War on Poverty by revealing its roots in local activism and policy experiments.

"A brief, cogent analysis of gentrification in Chicago ... an incisive and useful narrative on the puzzle of urban development."-- Kirkus Reviews In the years after World War II, a movement began to bring the m

A prizewinning political scientist traces the origins of urban-rural political conflict and shows how geography shapes elections in America and beyond Why is it so much easier for the Democratic Party to win the national popular vote than to build and maintain a majority in Congress? Why can Democrats sweep statewide offices in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan yet fail to take control of the same states' legislatures? Many place exclusive blame on partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression. But as political scientist Jonathan A. Rodden demonstrates in Why Cities Lose, the left's electoral challenges have deeper roots in economic and political geography. In the late nineteenth century, support for the left began to cluster in cities among the industrial working class. Today, left-wing parties have become coalitions of diverse urban interest groups, from racial minorities to the creative class. These parties win big in urban districts but struggle to capture the suburban and rural seats necessary for legislative majorities. A bold new interpretation of today's urban-rural political conflict, Why Cities Lose also points to electoral reforms that could address the left's under-representation while reducing urban-rural polarization.

Cities, War and Terrorism is the first book to look critically at the ways in which warfare, terrorism and counter-terrorism policies intersect in cities in the post Cold-War period. A path-breaking exploration of the intersections of war, terrorism and cities Argues that contemporary cities are the key strategic sites of geopolitical conflict Written by the world’s leading analysts of the intersections of urban space and military and terrorist violence Draws on cutting-edge research from geography, history, architecture, planning, sociology, critical theory, politics, international relations and military studies Provides up-to-date empirical analyses of specific conflicts, including 9/11, the “War on Terrorism”, the Balkan wars, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and urban antiglobalization battles Offers lay readers a sophisticated perspective on the violence that is engulfing our increasingly urbanised world