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REGIONAL AND NATIONAL PERSPECTNES ON AMERICAN URBANHISTORY James Michael Russell Kenneth Severens. Charleston: AntebellumArchitectureand CivicDestiny. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988. xiii + 315 pp. Illus. Margaret Ripley Wolfe. Kingsport,Tennessee: A PlannedAmerican Cily. Lexington: University Press of Kentuck--y,1987. xii + 259 pp. Illus., maps. Michael H. Ebner. CreatingChicago'sNorthSlwre:A SuburbanHistory.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. xxx + 338 pp. Illus., maps. Eric H. Monkkonen. America Becomes Urban:The Developmentof U.S. Cities& Towns, 1780-1980. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. xvi + 332 pp. Illus. Although it can be dated at least as far back as 1933 and the publication of Arthur Schlesinger, Sr.'s The Rise of the City: 1878-1898, urban history as a specialty in American historiography clearly came into its own in the 1960s, at the same time that politicians, public figures and the media in the United States publicized the idea of an "urban crisis." Amidst signs of hope and despair, urban renewal and ghetto riots, scholars and the general public alike paid more attention to the nation's cities than ever before. American urban history thrived in this climate of public awareness of "urban dilemmas." Oxford University Press, for example, in 1967 launched its Urban Life in America series, which published a number of pivotal works in the field. A new journal, the Jou.ma/ of Urban History,began in 1974. During the 1960s and early 1970s, much scholarly attention was given to the social and geographic mobility of the "inarticulate," an historical perspective on the undcr~class of American cities which was in keeping with the ideology of political activists involved with contemporary problems. This topic was the central preoccupation of those who engaged in the "new urban history." These trends in historical scholarship obviously had their roots in the politics of the period and their decline may well be due partly to the political conservatism of the 1980s. Yet urban history faces graver challenges than the turn to the right in American politics. Even in its halcyon days, it never 266 Jarnes Michael Russell seemed to get beyond critical problems of definition and method. The "new urban history" was in the forefront of the application of quantitative methodologies in American social history, but its practitioners could never agree on such basic questions as what "urban" meant, what a "city"was, and what separated urban from social history.1 Currently, even those problems seem far less significant than the general loss of interest in the field. The authors of perhaps the best textbook in American urban history had great difficulty in finding a publisher for an updated version of their work.2 The Oxford series has long since expired. Leading American urban specialists have recently begun to fight against these disturbing tendencies. Prompted by a very low turnout-for a fine paper presented by Carl Abbott at the 1988 convention of the Organization of American Historians, Kenneth T. Jackson and others have organized an Urban History Association. The Association's goals include the awarding of prizes for books and articles in urban history in general--not just those concerned with the United States but also those concerned with Canada and the rest of the world.3 It has already published the first issue of a newsletter to promote a movement which it hopes will restore the prominence of urban history in the profession. The books reviewed in this essay will not by themselves lead urban history back to the promised land, but all of them are valuable. The books by Kenneth Severens, Margaret Ripley Wolfe and Michael Ebner should appeal to local audiences in the places described in those studies. Why works by urban historians have not reached such audiences to any appreciable extent is a question that needs an answer. It is not simply because of turgid prose or poor marketing techniques by university presses, but whatever the reason or reasons, they do not apply to the local studies reviewed here. All are clearly written and are not dominated by sophisticated methodologies which are difficult to understand. Monkkonen's book is in a different category. It does contain some high level quantitative analysis, which is, however, mostly relegated to the footnotes...

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