U.S. Urban History

History 304/504

 

J. Mark Souther, Ph.D.
Rhodes Tower 1904
Department of History
Cleveland State University
Spring Semester 2007

Home

Requirements

Readings

Schedule

Euclid Corridor Project

Syllabus (PDF)

Links



Souther Home

 

Required Texts

Catherine Cocks, Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850-1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

George G. Foster, New York by Gas-light and Other Urban Sketches, ed. Stuart M. Blumin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (New York: Vintage Books, 2004).

Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: Dover, 1971).

Thomas J. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, Revised ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

Additional articles and book chapters are available on Electronic Course Reserve (ECR). All are PDF files. The computer lab on the fourth floor of Main Classroom Building offers free printing. You should always bring a copy of any required reading to class on the day for which it is assigned.

 

This image from Peaceful Shaker Village, a late-1920s promotional booklet for the planned Cleveland, Ohio, suburb of Shaker Heights, shows fanciful houses in the clouds, ostensibly linked to downtown Cleveland as symbolized by the Terminal Tower. It suggests a hopeful vision of an urban future in which downtown and suburb could coexist harmoniouslya vision which proved illusive.