Despite the pundits who have written its epitaph and the latter-day refugees who have fled its confines for the half-acre suburban estate, the city neighborhood has endured as an idea central to American culture. In "A Nation of Neighborhoods", Benjamin Looker presents us with the city neighborhood as both an endless problem and a possibility. Looker investigates the cultural, social, and political complexities of the idea of "neighborhood" in postwar America and how Americans grappled with vast changes in their urban spaces from World War II to the Reagan era. In the face of urban decline, competing visions of the city neighborhood's significance and purpose became proxies for broader debates over the meaning and limits of American democracy. By studying the way these contests unfolded across a startling variety of genres – Broadway shows, radio plays, urban ethnographies, real estate documents, and even children's programming – Looker shows that the neighborhood ideal has functioned as a central symbolic site for advancing and debating theories about American national identity and democratic practice.
About the Author
Benjamin Looker teaches in the American Studies Department at Saint Louis University. He is the author of "Point from Which Creation Begins: The Black Artists' Group of St. Louis".
Reviews
"'A Nation of Neighborhoods' is a big book in every sense of the phrase. It's a major work that brings together urban history, with its deep commitment to understanding the changing form and function of the American city, and American Studies, with its interpretive reading of all kinds of culture. Looker's sweeping, meticulously researched argument, written in welcoming prose and bringing together everything from ethnic identity movements to Sesame Street, offers a definitive and often surprising look at the idea of neighborhood in the 20th century" – Carlo Rotella, director, American Studies, Boston College
"Looker nails the seductive and powerful quality of the imagined neighborhood rather than mistakenly trying to settle on a correct empirical definition – the tack many empiricists take. Navigating a terrain that is huge – the book's complex historical period stretches from the WWII era to 1980 – and fraught with sand traps, Looker unearths in rich detail the many ways in which the neighborhood concept has been used, with intriguing results and often brilliant insights. A Nation of Neighborhoods is intellectually sharp and packed with rigorous scholarship and big ideas" – Robert J. Sampson, author of "Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect"
"Looker's 'A Nation of Neighborhoods' is an extraordinary scholarly contribution, an original, deeply researched, elegantly written book that helps us look in fresh ways at postwar America. It represents the best of contemporary cultural history – sophisticated in its approaches, carefully bold in both its claims and its reach across the widest range of genres" – Daniel Horowitz, author of "On the Cusp: The Yale College Class of 1960 and a World on the Verge of Change"
"Looker's 'A Nation of Neighborhoods' transforms neighborhoods from backdrops to the center of the action. Looker's deeply original analysis ranges formidably across American intellectual history and popular culture, examining literature and the arts, but also mining television, music, photography, plays, and museums. A rich treatment that rewards multiple re-readings, 'A Nation of Neighborhoods' will change how you see the American city – starting with Sesame Street and working all the way through the presidency" – Amanda I. Seligman, author of "Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago's West Side"
