We will begin as a class by exploring what we all understand the metropolis to be: who lives in it? and who lives in it where? who governs it? what makes it prosper? and what makes it suffer and decay? After this search for our class's understanding, the course follows a number of themes: what brought this characteristic modern settlement into being? what makes it grow and change? who controls it at the local or neighborhood level? at the municipal and state level? and at the national level? and what policies and programs have been proposed and undertaken in the past to manage these places? What aspects of the metropolis did past residents see? and what did they not see? What are the meanings and consequences of being invisible in the metropolis? And conversely, what does it mean to be seen and to be heard?

As in former times when Boston University students felt great unease and urgency about the management of the nation's domestic affairs and its cities (as in 1974), this course will be taught simultaneously at two different intensities. The basic course, for those who wish to increase their understanding of the modern metropolis and its history, is Course A. Undergraduate students wishing a fuller penetration of the subject will be allowed to elect the additional readings, papers, and discussions.

Course B students will do all the work assigned for Course A and in addition they will write two short papers based on supplementary readings of their choice, and they will attend occasional Friday discussion sections. Graduate students who enroll in this course for credit (HI-870) must follow Course B.

The basic course (Course A) will be carried on in a reading-question-discussion form. For each session the instructor will propose questions that will be drawn out of the assigned texts. The classroom discussion will devolve about the core questions which appear in this syllabus.

Since the success and pleasures of this course depend on the quality of the day-by-day preparation by the class members, students whose inclination or schedule do not permit them to prepare readings on an advance basis should not enroll in this course. Midway through the course there will be an hour examination (Oct. 31), and, at the end there will be a two-hour Final Examination (December 19). Please be aware that no incompletes are given in either course A or Course B.

Ralph Ellison

The Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1947)

Robert Fisher

Let the people Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America (Boston: Twayne, 1984)

John H. Mollenkopf

The Contested City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983)

Jacob A. Riis

How the Other Half Lives ( New York: Scribners, 1890, Dover Edition 1971)

Tom Wolfe

The Bonfire of the Vanities (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1987)

Xerox Kit of Readings from Gnomon Copy #9V:

Laurence C. Gerckens

"Historical Development of American City Planning," in Frank S. So et al., The Practice of Local Government Planning (Washington: International City Management Association, 1979), 21-57.

James Bryce

American Commonwealth. v 2 ( 1888, rev. ed., 1910), 93-100, 379-405.

Jon A. Peterson

"The Impact of Sanitary Reform upon American Urban Planning 1840-1890," Journal of Social History, 13 (Fall, 1979), 83-103.

Jon A. Peterson

"The City Beautiful Movement, Forgotten Origins and Lost Meanings," Journal of Urban History, 2 (August, 1976),415-434.

Robert L. Wrigley, Jr.

"The Plan of Chicago: Its Fiftieth Anniversary," Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 26 (February, 1960), 31-38.

Mark A. Weiss

The Rise of the Community Builders: the American real estate Industry and urban land planning (1987), 1-12, 17-52, 158-162.

Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein & Frederick L. Ackerman

Planning the Fourth Migration (from Survey Graphic, May, 1925 reprint, Carl Sussman, ed., Cambridge, 1976), 52-79.

Arnold R. Hirsch

The Making of the Second Ghetto: Race & Housing in Chicago 1940-1960 (New York, 1983), 40-62.

Alan Altschuler

"The Innercity Freeway," in his The City Planning Process: A Political Analysis (Ithaca, 1965), 17-83.

Richard Broadman

"What Happened to Mission Hill?" brochure to accompany the film Mission Hill and the Miracle of Boston, (Boston, 1980).

Norman Mailer

"Hipsters," in Advertisements for Myself (1959 reprint New York, 1981), 294-320.

William Kornblum

"Achieving Against All Odds," in Vernon Boggs et al., The Apple Sliced (South Hadley, 1984), 237-253.

Students electing course B will write two 5-page papers which follow some topic of urban history through several decades.The choice of topic and books will be worked out in consultation with the professor. Typical themes might follow poverty, family life, municipal politics, employment, immigration, race relations, planning, or new towns. Each paper is to be built out of the reading of two books. The first paper is due Sept. 29, the second Nov. 21.

Students who have no background in urban history should consult the following:

James E. Vance, Jr.

This Scene of Man, the role and structure of the city in the geography of western civilization (1977). An overview of the cities since ancient Greece.

Sam Bass Warner, Jr.

The Urban Wilderness, a history of American City (1972), chs. 3-5. A summary of the patterns of growth of American big cities.

Jane Jacobs

Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984). An unusual and wise theory of why cities prosper.

Gwendolyn Wright

Building the Dream, a social history of housing in America (1981).

And by all means look through the following series of picture books that portrays the history of New York City in visual terms:

John A. Kuowenhoven

Columbia Historical Portrait of New York (1953).

Benjamin Blum

New York Photographs 1850-1950 (1982).

Berenice Abbott

Changing New York (1936) [reprinted as New York in the Thirties, 1973].

Weegee (Arthur Fellig)

Weegee's People (1946, reprint 1975).

Langston Hughes

Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955).

Herb Goro

The Block (1970).

Andre Kertesz

Of New York (1976).

All students should be aware of a recent set of useful bibliographic essays on American urban history:

Howard Gillette, Jr. & Zane L. Miller, eds.

American Urbanism: A Historiographical Review (1987)

Gunther Barth

City people: the rise of modern city culture in nineteenth century America (1979)

Thomas Bender

Community & Social Change in America (1978)

Stuart M. Blumin

The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American city, 1760-1900 (1989)

Richard del Castillo

The Los Angeles Barrio 1850-1890 (1979)

Walter I. Firey

Land Use in Central Boston (1947)

Neil Harris

"Museums, Merchandising, and Popular Taste: the Struggle for Influence," in Ian Quinby, ed., Material Culture the Study of American Life (1978), 140-175.

Dolores Hayden

The Grand Domestic Revolution: a history of feminist designs for American homes, neighborhoods, and cities (1981)

Lewis Mumford

Roots of Contemporary American Architecture (1952)

Norman T. Newton

Design on the Land, the development of landscape architecture (1971)

Moses Rischin

The Promised city, New York's Jews 1870-1914 (1963)

Laura Wood Roper

Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (1973)

Graham Taylor

Satellite Cities, a study of industrial suburbs (1915, reprint 1970)

Douglass Shand Tucci

Built in Boston, city and suburb (1978)

Sam Bass Warner, Jr.

Streetcar Suburbs, the process of change in Boston 1870-1900 (1962)

Dana F. White

The Urbanists 1865-1915 (1989)

Walter Muir Whitehill

Boston, a Topographical History (1968)

Cynthia Zaitzevsky

Frederick Law Olmsted and the Boston Park System (1982)

Olivier Zunz

The Changing Face of inequality, urbanization, industrial development, and immigrants in Detroit 1880-1920 (1982)

Jane Addams

Twenty Years at Hull House (1910)

Thomas Bender

New York Intellect: a history of intellectual life in New York City (1987)

John Bodnar, Roger Simon & Michael P. Weber,

Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh 1870-1940 (1977)

James Borchert

Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion, and Folk Life in the city 1850-1970 (1980)

Margaret Byington

Homestead: the households of a mill town (part of the Pittsburgh survey of 1910, reprint 1974)

Charles W. Cheape

Moving the Masses: Urban Public Transit in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. 1880-1912 (1980)

Carl W. Condit

Chicago 1912-1929: building, planning, and urban technology (1973)

Michael H. Ebner

Creating Chicago's North Shore: A Suburban History (Chicago, 1988)

Robert Fogelson

The Fragmented metropolis: Los Angeles (1977)

Kenneth Fox

Better City Government: Innovation in American Urban Politics 1850-1937 (1977)

John Hancock

John Nolen and the American Planning Movement: history of cultural change and community response 1900-1940 (1964)

Werner Hegemann & Elbert Peets

The American Vitruvius, an architect's handbook of civic art (1922, reprint 1972)

John Higham

Strangers in the Land: patterns of American nativism 1860-1925 (1963)

Richard W. Judd

Socialist Cities: municipal Politics and the Grass Roots of American Socialism (1989)

Roy Lubov

The Progressive and the Slums: tenement house reform in New York city 1890-1917 (1962)

Roy Lubove

The Professional Altruist: the emergence of social work as a career 1880-1930 (1973)

Gilbert Osofsky

Harlem, The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York 1890-1930 (1966)

Martin Schiesl

The Politics of Efficiency: Municipal administration and reform in America 1880-1920 (1977)

Mel Scott

American City Planning since 1890 (1971)

Mary K. Simkovitc

The City Worker's World (1917)

Alan Spear

Black Chicago; the making of a Negro ghetto (1967)

Maren Stange

Symbols of Ideal Life, Social Documentary photography in America 1890-1950 (1989)

Lillian D. Wald

The House on Henry Street (1910)

William H. Wilson

The City Beautiful Movement (1989)

Thomas Adams

Building the City, vol. 2 of The Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs-(1931)

Robert A. Caro

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974)

Paul K. Conkin

Tomorrow's New World: the New Deal community program (1959)

Galen Cranz

The Politics of Park-Design: a history of urban parks in America (1982)

Lewis A. Erenberg

Steppin' Out: New York nightlife and the transformation of American culture (1981)

James Ford,

Slums and Housing, 2 vols. (1936, reprint 1972)

Ronald P. Formisano & Constance K. Burns

Boston 1700-1980: the evolution of urban politics (1984)

Henry-Russell Hitchcock & Phillip Johnson

The International style: architecture since 1922 (1932)

Preston J. Hubbard

Origins of the TVA (1961)

Anthony Jackson

A Place Called Home: a history of low-cost housing in Manhattan (1976)

Kenneth T. Jackson

The Ku KIux Klan in the City 1915-1930 (1967)

Kenneth T. Jackson

Crabgrass Frontier: surburbanization of the United States (1985)

Ira Katznelson

City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (1981)

Arthur Mann

La Guardia Comes to Power (1965)

Peter Marcuse

"Housing Policy and City Planning, The Puzzling Split in the United States 1893-1931," in Gordon Cherry, ed., Shaping the Urban World (1980), 23-58.

William D. Miller

Harsh and Dreadful Love: Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement (1973)

John Stack

International Conflict in an American city: Boston's Irish, Italians and Jews 1935-1944 (1970)

Daniel Schaffer

Garden Cities of America: the Radburn experience (1982)

Clarence Stein

Toward New Towns for America (1957)

Sam Bass Warner

The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth (Revised ed., 1987)

Michael Bernick

Urban Illusions: new approaches to inner city unemployment (1987)

John C. Bollens & Henry J. Schmandt

The Metropolis: People, Politics, and economic life (4th ed., 1982)

John T. Cumbler

Social History of Economic Decline

Joseph L. Eldredge

Architecture Boston (Boston Society of Architects, 1976)

Sidney Fine

Violence in the Model city: the Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Race Riot of 1967 (1989)

Bernard J. Fried en & Lynne B. Sagalyn

Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities (1990)

Paul & Percival Goodman

Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life (1947)

Michael Harrington

The Other America: poverty in the United States (1962)

Dolores Hayden

Redesigning the American Dream: the future of housing, work and family life (1984)

John Herbers

The New Heartland: America's Flight Beyond the Suburbs and How It Is Changing Our Future (1988)

Edgar M. Hoover & Raymond Vernon

Anatomy of Metropolis, the changing distribution of people and jobs within the New York Metropolitan region (1959)

Jane Jacobs

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

Bharati Mukherjee

Middleman and Other Stories (1989)

Peter O. Mutter

Contemporary Suburban America (1981)

Constance Perin

Belonging in America: Reading Between the Lines (1987)

Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward

Regulating the Poor: the function of Public welfare (1971)

Elizabeth H. Pleck

Black Migration and Poverty in Boston (1979)

President's Commission for a National Agenda for the Eighties

Urban America in the 1980's (1980, U.S. President James Carter)

Nancy Lurie Saltzman

Buildings and Builders: an architectural history of Boston University (1985)

Allen J. Scott

Metropolis: from the division of labor to urban form (1986)

Neil Smith & Peter Williams

Gentrification of the City (1986)

Michael and Susan Southworth

The Boston Society of Architects: A.I.A. Guide to Boston (1984)

Jon C. Teaford

City and Suburb: the Political fragmentation of modern America 1850-1970 (1979)

Seymour Toll

Zoned America (1969)

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

The President's National Urban Policy Report (1982, U.S. President Ronald Reagan)

William Julius Wilson

The Truly Disadvantaged, the inner city, the underclass, and public policy (1987)

William H. Whyte

The City, rediscovering the center (1988)