The recent riots in Los Angeles brought the urban crisis back to the center of public policy debates in Washington, D.C., and in urban areas throughout the United States. The contributors to this volume examine the major policy issues--race, housing, transportation, poverty, the changing environment, the effects of the global economy--confronting contemporary American cities. Raymond A. Mohl begins with an extended discussion of the origins, evolution, and current state of Federal involvement in urban centers. Michael B. Katz follows with an insightful look at poverty in turn-of-the-century New York and the attempts to ameliorate the desperate plight of the poor during this period of rapid economic growth. Arnold R. Hirsch, Mohl, and David R. Goldfield then pursue different facets of the racial dilemma confronting American cities. Hirsch discusses historical dimensions of residential segregation and public policy, while Mohl uses Overtown, Miami, as a case study of the social impact of the construction of interstate highways in urban communities. David Goldfield explores the political ramifications and incongruities of contemporary urban race relations. Finally, Carl Abbott and Sam Bass Warner, Jr., examine the impact of global economic developments and the environmental implications of past policy choices. Collectively, the authors show us where we have been, some of the needs that must be addressed, and the urban policy alternatives we face.
" . . . a sweeping, analytical synethsis of collective violence from the colonial experience to the present." —American Studies "Gilje has written 'the book' on rioting throughout American history." —The Historian ". . . a thorough, illuminating, and at times harrowing account of man's inhumanity to man." —William and Mary Quarterly " . . . fulfills its title's promise as an encyclopedic study . . . an impressive accomplishment and required reading for anyone interested in America's contentious past." —Journal of the Early Republic "Gilje has written a thought-provoking survey of the social context of American riots and popular disorders from the Colonial period to the late 20th century. . . . a must read for anyone interested in riots." —Choice In this wide-ranging survey of rioting in America, Paul A. Gilje argues that we cannot fully comprehend the history of the United States without an understanding of the impact of rioting. Exploring the rationale of the American mob brings to light the grievances that motivate its behavior and the historical circumstances that drive the choices it makes. Gilje's unusual lens makes for an eye-opening view of the American people and their history.
“Not since Angela Davis’s 2003 book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, has a scholar so persuasively challenged our conventional understanding of the criminal legal system.” —Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., Washington Post From one of our top historians, a groundbreaking story of policing and “riots” that shatters our understanding of the post–civil rights era. What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation’s streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color. To many observers, the protests appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence. Yet, as the acclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire, the events of 2020 had clear precursors—and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past. Even in the aftermath of Donald Trump, many Americans consider the decades since the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s as a story of progress toward greater inclusiveness and equality. Hinton’s sweeping narrative uncovers an altogether different history, taking us on a troubling journey from Detroit in 1967 and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992 and beyond to chart the persistence of structural racism and one of its primary consequences, the so-called urban riot. Hinton offers a critical corrective: the word riot was nothing less than a racist trope applied to events that can only be properly understood as rebellions—explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and violent order. As she suggests, if rebellion and the conditions that precipitated it never disappeared, the optimistic story of a post–Jim Crow United States no longer holds. Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson launched the “War on Crime,” sending militarized police forces into impoverished Black neighborhoods. Facing increasing surveillance and brutality, residents threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at officers, plundered local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions. Hinton draws on exclusive sources to uncover a previously hidden geography of violence in smaller American cities, from York, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois, to Stockton, California. The central lesson from these eruptions—that police violence invariably leads to community violence—continues to escape policymakers, who respond by further criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing underlying socioeconomic causes. The results are the hugely expanded policing and prison regimes that shape the lives of so many Americans today. Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation’s enduring strife, America on Fire is also a warning: rebellions will surely continue unless police are no longer called on to manage the consequences of dismal conditions beyond their control, and until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality.
Mob violence - often an interracial expression of the urban poverty found in major cities in the United States - is a phenomenon that has plagued this country repeatedly in the twentieth century. From Reverend King to Rodney King, historical figures and incidents have shed new light on circumstances that bring about violence and the political context in which federal policy responds to the seemingly intractable social and economic problems that underlie the violence. In Understanding Urban Unrest, author Dennis E. Gale compares the federal programs that have been tested since 1966 and makes observations about the probable political response to urban interracial violence and poverty in the future. In addition, he contends that place-based patchwork policies are not effective and that only fundamental changes in the United States's economic structure and federal policy agenda can offer any real solutions for the nation's cities and its poor.
Authored by prominent scholars, the twelve essays in this volume use the historical perspective to explore American urban housing policy as it unfolded from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries. Focusing on the enduring quest of policy makers to restore urban community, the essays examine such topics as the war against the slums, planned suburbs for workers, the rise of government-aided and built housing during the Great Depression, the impact of post–World War II renewal policies, and the retreat from public housing in the Nixon, Carter, and Reagan years.
The fascinating story of Boston's violent past is told for the first time in this history of the city's riots, from the food shortage uprisings in the 18th century to the anti-busing riots of the 20th century.
