San Antonio College Library

"Youngtown, Arizona, opened in 1954 and was the first development community to have a minimum age requirement (then 65) and to ban underage children as permanent residents. The developer Del Webb unveiled Sun City six years later. Adjacent to Yountown, it offered modest homes abutting a golf course. In the ensuing decades, active adult communities have proliferated, including Harold Schwartz's The Villages in central Florida, today [America's] largest...

"Written by one of this country's foremost urban historians, Downtown is the first history of what was once viewed as the heart of the American city. It tells the fascinating story of how downtown - and the way Americans thought about downtown - changed over time. By showing how businessmen and property owners worked to promote the well-being of downtown, even at the expense of other parts of the city, it also gives a riveting account of spatial politics...

"David Russo's history of American towns looks at their founding, development, and the varieties of life they embraced from earliest colonial times to the present. His chronicle is wide-ranging in its description, from coast to coast and border to border. But while his aim is to discern patterns in the lives of American towns, he illustrates these shapes and structures with a great many specific examples of how towns came into existence, grew or declined,...

A richly documented history of the five major cities of colonial America--Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Newport, and Charleston--during the crucial years preceding the Revolution.

"This is the story of how seven urban fires - dramatic and terrible conflagrations in themselves - have together shaped the larger course of American history." "The Boston fire of 1760 set the stage for the American Revolution. The Pittsburgh fire of 1845 proved how adaptable historical memory could be. From the ashes of the Chicago fire of 1871 emerged the modern skyscraper - transforming urban living and land values - and sparking the class strife...

"American urban form--the spaces, places, and boundaries that define city life--has been evolving since the first settlements of colonial days. The changing patterns of houses, buildings, streets, parks, pipes and wires, wharves, railroads, highways, and airports reflect changing patterns of the social, political, and economic processes that shape the city. In this book, Sam Bass Warner and Andrew Whittemore map more than three hundred years of the...

Overview: The history of the American city is, in many ways, the history of the United States. Although rural traditions have also left their impact on the country, cities and urban living have been vital components of America for centuries, and an understanding of the urban experience is essential to comprehending America's past. America's Urban History is an engaging and accessible overview of the life of American cities, from Native American settlements...

America's cities: celebrated by poets, courted by politicians, castigated by social reformers. In their numbers and complexity they challenge comprehension. Why is urban America the way it is? Eric Monkkonen offers a fresh approach to the myths and the history of US urban development, giving us an unexpected and welcome sense of our urban origins. His historically anchored vision of our cities places topics of finance, housing, social mobility, transportation,...