- Hardcover: 408 pages
- Publisher: Princeton University Press; illustrated edition edition (Oct 13 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0691070261
- ISBN-13: 978-0691070261
- Product Dimensions: 25.1 x 16.2 x 3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 739 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,229,425 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
Self has challenged historians to reconsider the way that they study postwar black urban communities.
(Albert S. Broussard Journal of American History )
(Albert S. Broussard Journal of American History )
Review
American Babylon traces the dialectic of suburbanization and black power in my hometown of Oakland, California. Encapsulating the postwar history of hundreds of mid-sized American cities, Robert Self's original and fascinating case study historicizes city-suburb racial segregation as a creation within living memory. We cannot heal or make sense of the nation we live in now without American Babylon.
(Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University, author of "Southern History across the Color Line" )
(Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University, author of "Southern History across the Color Line" )
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
WHEN THE CENTURY'S most violent and bloody war came to a close in 1945, for whom in the United States had victory been secured? Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
WHEN THE CENTURY'S most violent and bloody war came to a close in 1945, for whom in the United States had victory been secured? Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
rigorous and accessible,
By A Customer
This review is from: American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Hardcover)
I read American Babylon after hearing about it on the radio, and came away impressed with the author's ability to make a remarkably complex process - the interplay of surburban development, urban decline, racial politics, and civil rights - accessible to an amateur such as myself. The book lays out a persuasive explanation of why things are they way they are in Oakland, and by (my) extension in many urban areas around the country, including my own hometown of Brooklyn. In doing so it seems to me to be the best sort of historical analysis: rigorous, remarkably detailed, and carefully documented, but useful to the public at large. Highly recommended.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant history that should be read by political activists,
By California health care activist for single payer (Berkeley, California) - See all my reviews
This review is from: American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Hardcover)
Robert Self's "American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland" deserves the attention of grassroots political activists as much as academics. It is a brilliant analysis of the post-World War Two business strategy for Oakland, California and the boom (and boomerang to Oakland) in housing and jobs elsewhere in Alameda County that resulted. Self shows how the decline of Oakland was the other side of the coin in the creation of new communities in the open spaces nearby. He lays out the class and race contexts of the suburbanization process and shows the consequences for and responses by the labor movement and African Americans to the changes that were wrought. "American Babylon" thus provides, for example, an interesting account of the Black Panther Party. Finally, using this region in northern California as a case study, the book examines the origins of the anti-property tax movement, when the suburbs regime went sour. Since California is still embroiled over the same issues this book addresses -- taxes, urban revitalization, de-industrialization, racial equality, and the political and environmental impacts of suburban growth -- Robert Self's "American Babylon" could not be more timely.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Medium-sized Cities in the times of Urban Renewal,
By A Customer
This review is from: American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Hardcover)
Robert Self's book should interest readers interested in understanding the aftermath of urban renewal and development in US cities and the politics of race and class in the post-WWII to 1975 period. Self's work makes a contribution to studies of urban poltiics and the histories of cities and of the Civil Rights era by pointing to what has often been ignored or left invisible: that the so-called problems of people living in cities are often directly related to the overdevelopment of their surrounding suburbs (the noose), and that the problems of people of color in this country are directly related to the privileges of white people, structurally and historically. Thus, Self's book shows intimately and concretely how one might explore the dynamics of structural, institutionalized racism, in the post-Civil Rights era, when we all thought that the problem of blatant individualized racism had been solved.In addition, the book will be useful for those of us living and working or traveling through the Bay Area: It adds another part of the story, and links the decline of Oakland with the rise of Silicon Valley, and with shifting terrains of race and class politics. It also provides important historical perspective on the forces that started the long trajectory that we now live, the decisions that sowed the seeds for the so-called ghettos, but also for the gentrification and displacement that threatens to displace our communities today.
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