From its beginnings as a regional spa resort and an exclusive community of wealthy tobacco and textile families, Winston-Salem's West End has become an island of calm in the midst of a bustling Southern city of 200,000 residents. Built around one of the first electric streetcar lines in the country, the West End boasted "Millionaires' Row," where the Reynolds and Hanes families kept homes bought with manufacturing fortunes. When urban re-design and the aging of the neighborhood in the 1960s threatened the West End's streetscape, local residents and friends stepped in to preserve its beauty.
A sweeping history of American cities and towns, and the utopian aspirations that shaped them, by one of America’s leading urban planners and scholars. The first European settlers saw America as a paradise regained. The continent seemed to offer a God-given opportunity to start again and build the perfect community. Those messianic days are gone. But as Alex Krieger argues in City on a Hill, any attempt at deep understanding of how the country has developed must recognize the persistent and dramatic consequences of utopian dreaming. Even as ideals have changed, idealism itself has for better and worse shaped our world of bricks and mortar, macadam, parks, and farmland. As he traces this uniquely American story from the Pilgrims to the “smart city,” Krieger delivers a striking new history of our built environment. The Puritans were the first utopians, seeking a New Jerusalem in the New England villages that still stand as models of small-town life. In the Age of Revolution, Thomas Jefferson dreamed of citizen farmers tending plots laid out across the continent in a grid of enlightened rationality. As industrialization brought urbanization, reformers answered emerging slums with a zealous crusade of grand civic architecture and designed the vast urban parks vital to so many cities today. The twentieth century brought cycles of suburban dreaming and urban renewal—one generation’s utopia forming the next one’s nightmare—and experiments as diverse as Walt Disney’s EPCOT, hippie communes, and Las Vegas. Krieger’s compelling and richly illustrated narrative reminds us, as we formulate new ideals today, that we chase our visions surrounded by the glories and failures of dreams gone by.
The first history of the West End of London, showing how the nineteenth-century growth of theatres, opera houses, galleries, restaurants, department stores, casinos, exhibition centres, night clubs, street life, and the sex industry shaped modern culture and consumer society, and made London a world centre of entertainment and glamour.
A vivid and compelling memoir recounting the real lives, loves and friendship of 1940s Soho and its working girls. Barbara Tate was 17 when she heard the whispered word that would change her life: Soho. It would take four years for Barbara to escape her loveless home but when she finally made it to the forbidden streets of Soho - just as London was recovering from the trauma of the second world war - things would never be the same again. There the naive Barbara meets the beautiful and capricious Mae. When she takes a job as Mae's maid, Barbara imagines she'll be housekeeping. But down a shabby backstreet, Barbara discovers the secret lives of Soho's working girls. An astonishing world full of fierce friendships and bitter rivalries, dangerous men and desperate measures, Barbara soon learns that taking the money from a staggering supply of punters and making copious amounts of tea are only the bare essentials. She will need to be nursemaid, protector and confidante to impossible, adorable, self-destructive Mae.
Mother Wit By: Malaika B. Horne, PhD “This book describes in a vivid and poignant manner the remarkable ability of a mid-twentieth century Black woman—living under conditions of Apartheid as practiced in the United States—to overcome harsh and even grotesque societal obstacles, and succeed in rearing six children. That each of them went on to excel in their chosen fields is worthy of serious contemplation. In addition, the reader is provided insight and illumination on still taboo topics such as “colorism” and intra-group violence that engender and nourish self-hate among many in the African American Community. Moreover, the author’s penchant for candor is coupled with a constructive theme of hope and faith in the future.” ~~William M Harvey, PhD, psychologist “This is not just an evocative, at times heart-rending, portrait of an African-American mother but, as well, a colorful depiction of a Mississippi cum St. Louis family grappling with Jim Crow. In well written prose worthy of a cinema production, this book is an instant classic meriting a place on the top shelf alongside Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Richard Wright.” ~~Gerald Charles Horne, PhD, University of Houston “A moving tribute to a devoted mother whose determination, dedication and strong character allowed her family to breach barriers of race, class and economic want to achieve measurable success. Dr. Horne’s story of a loving mother with a keen intelligence who sacrificed all for her children is touching, inspiring and above all, instructive.” ~~Gwen Moore, curator, Missouri History Museum “Mother Wit is a love letter, first to Horne’s visionary mother Flora and then to the story of imperfect people making their way, together, in an even more horribly imperfect world. This is a story of color, of cruelty, of family and of coming to understand. Horne has written the kind of family history that tells the reader much more than the surface of the story. The lives of her characters, family members across several generations, are built upon the context of racism and all the byproducts thereof. Reading their stories and seeing the strength of Flora and the children she raised, is testament to tenacity and hope.” ~~Faith Sandler, executive director, Scholarship Foundation of St. Louis “Blessed is the mother who inspires her children to have aspirations and shows them the necessary steps to take to make those aspirations a reality. Malaika B. Horne writes, with a captivating style about such a mother, detailing the complex journey to attain seemingly simple goals, with clarity and forthrightness.” ~~Blanche M. Touhill, PhD, chancellor emerita, University of Missouri-St. Louis
