Matthew D. Lassiter’s The Suburban Crisis is a welcomed corrective to the public debates and academic scholarship on America’s dual “wars” on drugs and crime since the 1950s. This ambitious book explores several U.S. regions in a masterful narrative that connects the local, state, and national levels. Lassiter probes “the real and symbolic interrelationship between cities and suburbs,” and “integrates the areas of politics, culture, and public policy formation by analyzing the circulation of discourses and meanings that constructed the racialized drug crisis alongside social history investigations of how illegal drug markets, law enforcement, criminalized youth practices, and grassroots activism actually played out on the ground” (pp.5-6). He focuses especially on greater Los Angeles, a place that became the poster child of the ideal postwar American suburb. California was at the forefront of crafting drug-war policies and strategies, and Southern California accounted for an overwhelming proportion of drug arrests nationally. Lassiter challenges multiple common narratives, from white suburban youth victimhood to who was responsible for the so-called crisis of addiction (purportedly Black, Brown, and working-class urban “pushers”). He documents how various actors – particularly government leaders, law enforcement, and the media – responded, and how they produced a “suburban crisis.” The book makes several invaluable contributions. It documents how the war on drugs was the result of robust bipartisan support rooted in racist and anti-urban sentiments and driven by political interests, thus complicating ideas of conservative hawkishness versus liberal tolerance or softness. Lassiter shows how the war on drugs was a multi-scale metropolitan issue impacting municipalities and regions across the U.S. He does a major service to urban scholarship, bringing together the literatures on race, public policy, carceral studies, and urban/suburban studies, using America’s preoccupation with drugs and “law and order” as a powerful example. The Suburban Crisis is deeply researched and advances important original arguments that force us to reexamine this period of American political and metropolitan history along with deeply held conceptions of youth, drugs, race, law enforcement, and suburbs.

Best Book in Urban History

(excl. the U.S., Canada, and Europe)

Lucia Carminati

Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said: Labor Migration and the Making of the Suez Canal, 1859–1906

University of California Press

NEW AWARD

Joe William Trotter, Jr. Prize for Best First Book in Urban History

Joseph Plaster

Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin

Duke University Press

‘The Streets,’ ‘the abandoned,’ and ‘the margins’ are common references in urban history. But how to study street life? How to reconstruct world-making strategies among some of the most marginalized—queer, runaway street youth at the bottom of society’s moral and economic structure?  By drawing on ethnographies, archival records, and oral histories Joseph Plaster produces a remarkable portrait of how people within San Francisco’s post-war vice districts metabolized social trauma into queer public cultures, reciprocal exchange, and collective action. The particular brilliance, though, is in its storytelling. This is neither a recovery story of forgotten struggles nor a redemptive narrative of queer liberation. It is about a social world that was both ‘incredibly horrible and wonderful’; of shame and danger, chosen family and mutual aid. Throughout the book, gentrification threatens this social world, but Plaster never allows police raids and redevelopment schemes to displace the main actors in this book. The inclusion of ‘interventions’ offers a model for incorporating public humanities projects into our urban histories, a refreshing mode of storytelling that probes the links between past and present. Kids on the Street is a tour de force, setting a new bar for the craft of writing urban, queer, and public histories.

Honorable Mention

Kevin McQueeney

A City Without Care: 300 Years of Racism, Health Disparities & Health Care Activism in new Orleans

University of North Carolina Press

The Covid-19 pandemic ignited pleas for systematic historical analyses of racialized health- and medical care in African American and U.S. History. Focusing on the city of New Orleans, Kevin McQueeney’s A City Without Care responds to this urgent call. Unusual for a first book, it offers a model long durée study of the city’s racialized health care system from the onset of the transatlantic slave trade to the advent of Covid-19.  While such long durée studies usually rest on a wealth of published secondary sources, McQueeney’s book employs an impressive range of manuscript collections as well as oral histories, newspapers, and other primary accounts. He makes the compelling argument that racial disparities in health and health care had “deep roots” in the two-tier class and racialized medical system from the eighteenth century through the early twenty-first century. McQueeney documents a parallel, equally long durée account of African American medical and health care movements.  From the early years of their enslavement, Black New Orleanians not only crafted their own internal health care system. They also forged ongoing movements to demolish what some historians describe as “medical apartheid.” 

NEW AWARD

Lynn Hollen Lees Book Prize for Best Book in European Urban History

Cindy Ermus

The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

Cambridge University Press

Ermus’s study is a model of deep interdisciplinary scholarship based upon archival sources written in several European languages. Using the theoretical frameworks and literatures of urban history and the history of science, Ermus shows how an epidemic fostered evolving strategies of governance throughout the Atlantic world during the early days of the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. Her story follows the appearance of plague in Marseilles and other towns in Provence in 1720 and subsequent reactions in other European and Caribbean ports to the threat of contagion. She deftly uses local voices and ideas about infection to show how cities served as areas of experimentation for state efforts to improve public health in trading economies and centralize their control of them. At the center of her story is an inter-urban flow of information and a global network of communication that shaped hierarchies of power and influence. While the book’s temporal focus is narrow, its spatial framework is transnational, bringing metropoles, urban hierarchies, and colonies into one analytic framework. Ermus expertly ties this story of quarantines, blockades, and inspections to the process of state-making and to the growth of scientific understandings of disease. The Great Plague Scare of 1720 effectively bridges analyses at local and global levels, giving urban officials and economies central roles in her story. As urban historians debate how best to link particular urban stories to more general patterns, Ermus’s research design offers an elegant way forward in global urban history, while advancing understanding of practices of disaster management within the early modern Atlantic World.

Arnold Hirsch Award for Best Article

Nichole Nelson

Fractures within Fair Housing: The Battle for the Memory and Legacy of the Long Fair Housing Movement

Journal of Urban History 

Nelson offers an exciting critique of the Fair Housing Movement in the United States, through careful study of Progressive and Black radical engagement with the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing (NCDH) between 1950 and 1987. In broadening the temporality and actors within the fight to pass fair housing legislation against discriminatory practices and policies, Nelson’s work produces a much more nuanced and complicated understanding of the evolution of fair housing policy in the Civil Rights Movement/Era. Furthermore, the article “examines northern whites’ response to desegregation with a managed plan for integration as a form of neighborhood defense to shield their suburbs’ progressive reputations and high property values and prevent their communities from white flight and racial transition from white to Black. It underscores African Americans’ valiant but failed attempts to define integration on their own terms.” Nelson uses evidence from the Black radical organizers in South Orange, NJ and Shaker Heights, OH to demonstrate how their marginalization within broader Fair Housing and Progressive organizing mirrors the divides between Black Power and Black Moderate approaches to the Civil Rights Movement. Nelson shows the uneven legacies of the Community Reinvestment Act, which –as Nelson demonstrates– has more recently been abused to reify long-standing class and racial inequalities.

Titilola Halimat Somotan

Popular Planners: Newspaper Writers, Neighborhood Activists, and the Struggles against Housing Demolition in Lagos, Nigeria, 1951-1956

Journal of Urban History 

In her article, Somotan innovatively places Lagos, Nigeria at the center of critical urban planning debates in the context of British colonialism, African autonomy, and new visions for the built environment of a postcolonial nation. As Somotan writes, “at stake was who would shape the planning of Lagos Island and, by extension the postcolonial nation’s image.” Lagosians who were clear-eyed about the pitfalls of slum-clearance projects abroad during the mid-20th century, forged their own Global South perspective, entering the debate over intrusive modernist planning. As ordinary workers and citizens, Lagosians became “popular planners” agitating against colonial authorities’ spatial apartheid and during a very deliberate and slow transition of governing authority from British to African. This article powerfully demonstrates that anti-democratic planning regimes were hardly unique to Western nations, and that, for Lagosians who were fighting the neocolonial Development Board looking to impose its economic and settler priorities, ordinary citizens engaged in counterplans and organized actions to sustain their autonomy and their fight for African-owned lands and city spaces in the face of empire.

Michael Katz Award for Best Dissertation in Urban History 

Crystal Jing Luo

"Higher Rises, Lower Depths": Asian Americans and Globalization, 1967-1996

In "Higher Rises, Lower Depths": Asian Americans and Globalization, 1967-1996, Crystal Jing Luo offers a ground-level exploration of movements of capital and people during the late 20th century in urban immigrant communities in California. These enclaves—San Francisco’s Chinatown, Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, and Oakland’s Chinatown—grew from exclusions that isolated peoples of Asian descent. Forced into outsider status, Asian Americans sustained their communities through mutual aid and cultural and business ties with Asia. In the 1960s, city authorities started seeing in these survival strategies opportunities to build foreign investment and attract tourism. Luo adds fresh insights to a familiar story that after immigration reform in 1965, Asian immigrants revitalized American cities ravaged by white flight and fiscal crisis. Luo shows that municipal investment in global connections had a stratifying effect on enclaves, as overseas builders and corporations opened profitable ventures there, while low-income residents faced eviction and exploitation.

Luo offers a fascinating look into diversity and tensions within these communities that shaped their responses to globalizing shifts. Radicals tried bringing activism learned on college campuses home, but struggled to connect with new immigrants. Such disconnects could undermine complex coalitions that confronted abuses in the garment industry. Enclaves also included evolving nonprofits and professionals eager to leverage stereotypes to attract investment and capital. Skillfully weaving together local and transnational stories, Luo analyzes a broad range of sources across languages. This crucial work reveals a history of predatory inclusion of Asian American people and communities that continues to shape cities across the nation.

Honorable Mention

Bobby Cervantes

Las Colonias: Housing and American Poverty on the Modern Border

Las Colonias: Housing and American Poverty on the Modern Border does the important work of historicizing colonias, sprawling rural and mostly unincorporated border communities, along the Texas-Mexico borderlands. This project’s attentive analysis of how unequal resource distribution shaped border colonias’ development across time challenges scholarly framing that oftentimes assumes poverty’s inevitability. Instead, Las Colonias carefully traces the lengthier political and social forces that shaped living conditions for residents along Texas’s rural southern border. Later chapters on how colonia residents cultivated power and secured funding reveal how communities shaped the region in ways that are immensely significant today.

Cervantes expands our understandings of varied built environments throughout five meticulously researched and stunningly written chapters. Las Colonias moves skillfully and thoughtfully across scale to offer new insights about these understudied spaces along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Cervantes makes clear how peri-urban and rural areas are critical to understanding the transformation of modern America. Moreover, this project employs a transnational framework that lays bare the sources of inequality that still haunt contemporary colonias. This combined approach affords readers an opportunity to think about how the region’s cities and colonias developed in relation to one another.

Honorable Mention

Jacob Anbinder

Cities of Amber: Antigrowth Politics and the Making of Modern Liberalism

Cities of Amber: Antigrowth Politics and the Making of Modern Liberalism takes an innovative approach to the study of the seemingly ever-increasing cost of living in modern American cities. Beginning in the 1950s, Anbinder tells us, groups of loosely related conservationists, architectural preservationists, and rich and poor urban residents mobilized against new real estate development. His concept of anti-growth politics provides a lens to examine how this constellation of actors found common ground and in doing so, shaped today’s housing shortage.

Kenneth Jackson Award

Paige Glotzer (chair)

Domenic Vitiello

James Zarsadiaz

Best Book in Urban History Award

Kristin Stapleton (chair)

Andrew Newman

JT Way

Joe William Trotter Jr. Prize

Shannan Clark (chair)

Joe Trotter

Destin Jenkins

Lynn Hollen Lees Prize

Lynn Hollen Lees (chair)

Robert Fishman

Christopher Klemek