A glance at a list of America's fastest growing ""cities"" reveals quite a surprise: most are really overgrown suburbs. Places such as Anaheim, California, Coral Springs, Florida, Naperville, Illinois, North Las Vegas, Nevada, and Plano, Texas, have swelled to big-city size with few people really noticing-including many of their ten million residents. These ""boomburbs"" are large, rapidly growing, incorporated communities of more than 100,000 residents that are not the biggest city in the...

Assessing where the red/blue political line lies in swing states and how it is shiftingDemocratic-leaning urban areas in states that otherwise lean Republican is an increasingly important phenomenon in American politics, one that will help shape elections and policy for decades to come. Blue Metros, Red States explores this phenomenon by analyzing demographic trends, voting patterns, economic data, and social characteristics of twenty-seven major metropolit...

The concept of “the city” —as well as “the state” and “the nation state” —is passé, agree contributors to this insightful book. The new scale for considering economic strength and growth opportunities is “the megaregion,” a network of metropolitan centers and their surrounding areas that are spatially and functionally linked through environmental, economic, and infrastructure interactions.Recently a great deal of attention has been focused on the emergence of the European Union and...

Why is it that so many efforts by liberals to lift the black underclass not only fail, but often harm the intended beneficiaries?In Please Stop Helping Us, Jason L. Riley examines how well-intentioned welfare programs are in fact holding black Americans back. Minimum-wage laws may lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they price a disproportionate number of blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education is intended to address past di...

The reasons behind Detroit’s persistent racialized poverty after World War IIOnce America's "arsenal of democracy," Detroit is now the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of America’s racial and economic inequalities, Thomas Sugrue asks why Detroit and other industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty. He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures ...

In this new edition of Why Unions Matter, Michael D. Yates shows why unions still matter. Unions mean better pay, benefits, and working conditions for their members; they force employers to treat employees with dignity and respect; and at their best, they provide a way for workers to make society both more democratic and egalitarian. Yates uses simple language, clear data, and engaging examples to show why workers need unions, how unions are formed, how they operate, how collective ...

A sweeping examination of how American racism has broken the country's social compact, eroded America's common goods, and damaged the lives of every American--and a heartfelt look at how these deep wounds might begin to heal.Compared to other industrialized nations, the United States is losing ground across nearly every indicator of social health. Its race problem, argues Eduardo Porter, is largely to blame.In American Poison, the New York Time...

A gripping portrait of black power politics and the struggle for civil rights in postwar OaklandAs the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a nationwide tax revolt, California embodied a crucial motif of the postwar United States: the rise of suburbs and the decline of cities, a process in which black and white histories inextricably joined. American Babylon tells this story through Oakland and its nearby suburbs, tracing both the history of civil rights a...

"Reading this book revives the spirit of civic action today for those who are unjustifiably forlorn about overcoming injustice."— Ralph NaderAn on-the-ground history of ordinary Americans who took to the streets when political issues became personalThe 1960s are widely seen as the high tide of political activism in the United States. According to this view, Americans retreated to the private realm after the tumult of the civil rights and ant...

In this absorbing history, Jon C. Teaford traces the dramatic evolution of American metropolitan life. At the end of World War II, the cities of the Northeast and the Midwest were bustling, racially and economically integrated areas frequented by suburban and urban dwellers alike. Yet since 1945, these cities have become peripheral to the lives of most Americans. "Edge cities" are now the dominant centers of production and consumption in post-suburban America. Characterized by sprawling fr...

At its optimistic best, America has embraced its identity as the world's melting pot. Today it is on the cusp of becoming a country with no racial majority, and new minorities are poised to exert a profound impact on U.S. society, economy, and politics. The concept of a ""minority white"" may instill fear among some Americans, but William H. Frey, the man behind the demographic research, points out that demography is destiny, and the fear of a more racially diverse nation will almost certa...

An optimistic book for Americans who are asking, in the wake of Trump’s victory, What do we do now? The answer: We need to organize and fight to protect and expand our democracy.Americans are distraught as tightly held economic and political power drowns out their voices and values. Legendary Diet for a Small Planet author Frances Moore Lappé and organizer-scholar Adam Eichen offer a fresh, surprising response to this core crisis. This in...