A Nation of Neighborhoods

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Academics have long struggled to pinpoint precise definitions of ‘neighborhood,’ but as Looker  demonstrates, outside academe, a surprisingly ‘vast fleet’ of writers, politicians, artists, and activists unhampered by specifics constructed myriad ideal versions of the urban neighborhood from WWII to the 1980s. Looker insightfully demonstrates that cultural workers of all political persuasions fashioned representations of the urban small community because traditional values and experiences, as well as new visions for reshaping society, could be usefully attached to neighborhoods. Thus, the urban neighborhood became ‘a rich symbolic vehicle’ through which to debate often competing visions for the nation and for managing change and social division nearby. Progressing chronologically, each of the eleven chapters examines several related efforts to shape ideal visions of the urban neighborhood, defining and redefining terms such as blight, ghetto, and slum. Deconstructing examples of these ‘elaborate territories of the imagination,’ such as the children’s stories of Ezra Jack Keats and the Sesame Street television program, this author strikingly reveals just how relentlessly diverse ideas of ‘neighborhood’ have been offered as proxy for the meaning of America. Recommended.”

“In this always-informative, insightful, and well-written book, Looker deftly manages his way through the tangle of moves and counter-moves of an enduring national discourse. . . . An important and necessary glimpse into the nation’s moral geography.”

“This remarkable book . . , with its combination of a striking variety of sources and a close sensitivity to local detail, offers a groundbreaking new look at the politics and places of twentieth-century American cities. . . . Bursting at the seams with interesting materials . . . Looker deserves high praise for pulling off such an ambitious undertaking with such eloquence and sensitivity.”

“Looker’s A Nation of Neighborhoods brilliantly explores the ‘conflicted yet central role of neighborhood concepts’ in the national imagination. . . . A sweeping analysis of wide-ranging sources. . . . The range of texts serving as examples in the chronologically organized chapters is staggering.”

“A Nation of Neighborhoods represents an important addition to studies based on the proposition that ideas matter in the perceptions and actions that take place in urban settings. . . . The book should spark new interest in the exploration of the neighborhood and its place in the symbolic, political, structural, economic, and cultural life of the U.S.”

“A Nation of Neighborhoods deserves wide readership among historians of education, especially those interested in ‘bridging the gap’ between the fields of educational history and (sub)urban history. . . . A compelling portrait of the urban neighborhood as the preeminent site and symbol for articulating and contesting liberal visions of American citizenship, historical memory, and democratic practice. . . . Such a history of contestation is needed in order to complicate the all-too-common rise-and-fall narratives of twentieth-century urban neighborhood institutions.”