Christopher Shea: Historians are finally giving the suburbs their due--and changing their lily-white image
DEPICTIONS OF THE SUBURBS in movies and on TV run the gamut from A to, well, maybe C. Life there is derangingly conformist (``American Beauty"), creepily repressed (``Blue Velvet"), farcical (``Desperate Housewives"), or some combination of the three.
What the suburbs never seem like is a setting for history. Dismissed as places without a sense of place, they also seem timeless, in a bad sense: Except for the square footage, what separates the Levittown of the 1950s from a new cookie-cutter subdivision? But though the subject doesn't have the sexiness of the Civil War or Jacksonian democracy, a growing number of historians are taking a close look at the `burbs.
``In any history of postwar America, the suburbs deserve center stage," write Kevin M. Kruse, an associate professor of history at Princeton, and Thomas Sugrue, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, in their introduction to ``The New Suburban History" (Chicago), a new collection of essays that serves as a manifesto on the importance of the subject.
``We aren't claiming to have invented the wheel," Kruse cautions. Numerous scholars of urban planning have charted the growth both of carefully planned subdivisions and unchecked suburban sprawl. Kenneth Jackson, a Columbia University historian, produced a much-lauded history of the suburbs, ``The Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States," in 1985.
But that ``old" suburban history, the authors say, often featured a certain consensus narrative, in which the suburbs were lily-white, homogeneous, and bland-in contrast to the gritty, authentic city. That's not entirely wrong, but some recent titles of academic books capture the shift in perspective among a new group of scholars: ``My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in a Working-Class Suburb of Los Angeles, 1920-1965" (2002), for instance, by Becky Nicolaides, and ``Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century" (2005), by Andrew Wiese. (Both Nicolaides, a historian at the University of California at San Diego, and Wiese, of San Diego State University, have essays in ``The New Suburban History.") The suburbs, in this new perspective, have as much to do with 20th-century social and political movements as do Birmingham or South Boston.
In ``Places of Their Own," Wiese wrote provocatively that ``historians have done a better job of excluding African Americans from the suburbs than even white suburbanites." As early as 1940, one in five black Americans lived in the suburbs, suburbs that were a world apart from Mayfield, the home of the Cleavers. According to a contemporary sketch Wiese quotes, the suburbs of Los Angeles just after World War II featured: ``canary farms, artificial pools for trout fishing, rabbit fryers, dogs at stud, grass-shack eating huts, psychic mediums . . . bicycles to rent, and frogs for sale." In other words, not exactly picket fences and manicured lawns....
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What the suburbs never seem like is a setting for history. Dismissed as places without a sense of place, they also seem timeless, in a bad sense: Except for the square footage, what separates the Levittown of the 1950s from a new cookie-cutter subdivision? But though the subject doesn't have the sexiness of the Civil War or Jacksonian democracy, a growing number of historians are taking a close look at the `burbs.
``In any history of postwar America, the suburbs deserve center stage," write Kevin M. Kruse, an associate professor of history at Princeton, and Thomas Sugrue, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, in their introduction to ``The New Suburban History" (Chicago), a new collection of essays that serves as a manifesto on the importance of the subject.
``We aren't claiming to have invented the wheel," Kruse cautions. Numerous scholars of urban planning have charted the growth both of carefully planned subdivisions and unchecked suburban sprawl. Kenneth Jackson, a Columbia University historian, produced a much-lauded history of the suburbs, ``The Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States," in 1985.
But that ``old" suburban history, the authors say, often featured a certain consensus narrative, in which the suburbs were lily-white, homogeneous, and bland-in contrast to the gritty, authentic city. That's not entirely wrong, but some recent titles of academic books capture the shift in perspective among a new group of scholars: ``My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in a Working-Class Suburb of Los Angeles, 1920-1965" (2002), for instance, by Becky Nicolaides, and ``Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century" (2005), by Andrew Wiese. (Both Nicolaides, a historian at the University of California at San Diego, and Wiese, of San Diego State University, have essays in ``The New Suburban History.") The suburbs, in this new perspective, have as much to do with 20th-century social and political movements as do Birmingham or South Boston.
In ``Places of Their Own," Wiese wrote provocatively that ``historians have done a better job of excluding African Americans from the suburbs than even white suburbanites." As early as 1940, one in five black Americans lived in the suburbs, suburbs that were a world apart from Mayfield, the home of the Cleavers. According to a contemporary sketch Wiese quotes, the suburbs of Los Angeles just after World War II featured: ``canary farms, artificial pools for trout fishing, rabbit fryers, dogs at stud, grass-shack eating huts, psychic mediums . . . bicycles to rent, and frogs for sale." In other words, not exactly picket fences and manicured lawns....