Books like Crabgrass Frontier by Kenneth T. Jackson

Jane Jacobs’ seminal work argues that diverse, vibrant street life sustains cities, challenging conventional plans that favor large developments and uniformity.

A scholarly examination of Robert Moses, the powerful New York City planner whose initiatives shaped the city’s infrastructure and symbolized the concentration of municipal authority.

An incisive study of black women's experiments with love, solidarity, and freedom in early twentieth‑century America, exposing how their radical choices reshaped intimate life and defied social norms.

"Los Angeles pulsed with economic vitality and demographic growth in the decades following World War II. This detailed cultural history of L.A. from 1940 to 1970 traces the rise of a new suburban consciousness adopted by a generation of migrants who abandoned older American cities for Southern California's booming urban region. Eric Avila explores expressions of this new "white identity" in popular culture with discussions of Hollywood and film noir, Dodger Stadium, Disneyland, and L.A.'s renowned freeways. These institutions not only mirrored this new culture of suburban whiteness and helped to shape it, but also, as Avila argues, reveal the profound relationship between the increasingly fragmented urban landscape of Los Angeles and the rise of a new political outlook that rejected the tenets of New Deal liberalism and anticipated the emergence of the New Right."--BOOK JACKET.

For almost two centuries Americans have been moving to the suburbs in search of affordable family housing, unspoiled nature, and small-town sociability--only to find that their leafy new neighborhoods are part of the growing metropolitan sprawl. It is to this contested cultural landscape, where most Americans now live, that Dolores Hayden draws our attention.From nineteenth-century utopian communities and elite picturesque enclaves to early twentieth-century streetcar subdivisions and owner-built tracts to the vast postwar sitcom suburbs and the subsidized malls and office parks that followed (on a scale that earlier builders could never have imagined), Hayden reveals the cultural and economic patterns that have brought us to the present. She explores the interplay of natural and built environments, the complex antagonisms between real-estate developers and suburban residents, the hidden role of federal government, and the religious and ideological overtones of the "American dream" embedded in the suburbs. Hayden asks hard questions about who has benefited from the suburban building process and about "smart" growth and "green" building. And she makes a strong case for the revitalization of existing neighborhoods in place of unchecked new growth on rural fringes. Few readers will see our ubiquitous suburbs in the same way again.From the Hardcover edition.

A teenage girl in a small Colorado town faces the chilling impact of a World War II Japanese internment camp when a local murder turns suspicion toward the newcomers, raising questions of injustice and hidden secrets.

An oral history of the late 1960s that captures the voices of activists, organizers, students and veterans during the Vietnam War era, detailing protests, campus strife, and the turbulent social movements that shook American society.