Been There, Read That: Books About Cities

Today's reading and listening post is also connected to this year's academic reading challenge, the hardest categories: read two books about the same topic (Sports, Music, or the Same City/Town)
one should be ethnography, the other history.

Here are some fine pairings of books I love about places, or places I love about which some academics have written important and readable books. I'm writing about my own home-towns today, Austin, TX; NYC, Chapel Hill, NC and Atlanta, GA.

New York, New York: 

History: 

Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. I read this when I was teaching community college in NYC, and was doing research on riots and mobs in the 19th century for my book. It's a weighty tome that synthesizes a huge amount of scholarship into a readable narrative aimed at general readers. It won the Pulitzer Prize in history.

Kim Moody, From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York City 1974, to the Present. Kim Moody is a labor historian who wrote this book while he was teaching in New York City, and it is hands down the best history of the NY fiscal criss of the 1970s and the subsequent neoliberalization of NY politics. Moody advised me quite wisely in 2006, while he was finishing this project up, "no, do not buy an apartment. For the first time ever, it is cheaper to rent." Whew.

Josh Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since WWII. This is another great and readable book that is cited all the time. I don't agree with every aspect of Freeman's argument, but this book contains so much detail about unions, housing and city politics in the 1950s that it is definitely worth reading if you are interested in class and labor history. Think of this as the real background story of Ralph Kramden.

Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie 1850-1896  I have not read this book, but  I have heard Beckert speak, and see him cited all the time in NY history. This book is one of the first entries in thee school of economic history now called "The History of Capitalism" and is considered important.

And hey, maybe you were thinking of reading Jill Jonnes on the South Bronx, but I'd skip that one for now. She designed a friggin museum for the DEA headquarters in Washington. This suggests that she is not qualified to understand anything about the South Bronx. You'd be better off with Eric Chang's Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation which charts the rise of hip-hop in the South Bronx.

Ethnography:

Karen Ho,Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. This book says it in the title. Ho worked on Wall St while in Graduate school, and for this project she also attended formal recruitment events at elite colleges with her friends, and did interviews with people around Wall Street. It's a view into the world of the 1% as well as the work culture and infrastructure that supports them, very interesting.

Eric Tang, Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto. I have not read this book, but it comes highly recommended by my friend, KB, who really knows the South Bronx, and who regularly organizes author-talks and community education events in NYC. If anyone knows what to read, he does. Also, it gets props from both Junot Diaz and Lisa Lowe. Putting it on my TBR right now.

Oneka LaBennett, She's Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn I've been teaching this book as a great example of interdisciplinary ethnography for two years now, and my students love it. LaBennett, who is herself West Indian, did her study while volunteering at the Brooklyn Children's Museum where she got to know a group of West Indian girls and did work with them for a period of about ten years. Focused on the ways that teen girls really interact with popular culture, it is an intervention in current debates about hip-hop, gender, sexuality and body-image. She has a whole chapter based on a focus-group watching "America's Next Top Model" - really smart.

Phillipe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. This is a classic ethnography about the lives of young men selling crack in East Harlem. It's just about to come out in a second edition. I've also taught this book when I lived in New York and was teaching majority Black and Brown adult students working white-collar or service jobs around the financial district. What he has to say about how Black and Brown men are treated in such jobs and how they experience this definitely resonated with my students.

Atlanta, GA

History

Kevin Kruse, White Flight. I've already included this on my gentrification must-reads list, but it remains the essential history for anyone who lives in Atlanta today to read in order to understand what the Hell is going on in this city and how it relates to American politics more broadly.

Another must-read for ATlians is the late Cliff Kuhn's,Living Atlanta: An Oral History of the City 1914-1948. These interviews began as radio broadcasts, and the book was part of the UGA Press "Brown Thrasher" series.  If I were teaching a class on Atlanta history, this book would be on the top of my list. Kuhn who died last year, was also the executive director of the National Oral History Association, and was a mentor to almost every Georgia history student/professor I have met since moving to Atlanta.

Two more recent books on my own TBR about Atlanta are these:

Winston A. Grady-Willis, Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights 1960-1977 which is blurbed by Barbara Ransby; and Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement, which gets high praise as the best and most exhaustive work on the history of Civil Rights in Atlanta, and finally William Link's Atlanta: Cradle of the New South, which is about the Civil War and Reconstruction in Atlanta. Perhaps this would be good to read this July when the Battle of Atlanta is being commemorated around my neighborhood.

Ethnography: 

There was much less that I could find here, largely because most ethnographers hide the identity of the space where they did fieldwork.
   However, I did see this one, which looks interesting:  riffing off Elijah Anderson's "Code of the Street", Scott Jacques and Richard Wright's Code of the Suburb: Inside the World of Young Middle-Class Drug Dealers is a study of drug-dealers in an Atlanta suburb.

Just outside the Atlanta Metro is Dalton, GA, known as the carpet capital of the world, and home of  large Latin-American immigrant community. You can read about them in Davis et al, Voices from the Nueva Frontera, which as the title says, tries to give us the voices of immigrants outside the anti-immigrant rhetoric so common in this state.

Augusta, rather than Atlanta is the location of Melissa Checker's Polluted Promises, an historical ethnography of a neighborhood activist group. This is another beautifully written book, which I've also taught with success. Checker worked with an African-American community organization whose neighborhood had been made unliveable by industrial pollution, and explores the racial differences in environmentalist organizing at the local and national level.

Chapel Hill, North Carolina/Research Triangle

Chapel Hill is a much smaller town than Atlanta, but it's connected to Durham and Raleigh through what's called "The Research Triangle" and there are quite a few good studies about this whole region.

My favorite historical work featuring a large portion on Chapel Hill is Glenda Gilmore's
Defying Dixie which reveals the secret radical history of the town when Pauli Murray was there.

Leslie Brown, who did remarkable work on the Behind the Veil oral history project for the Center of Documentary Studies, is the author of this history of Durham under Jim Crow, Upbuilding Black Durham. Again, I haven't read this book, but it looks good.

For ethnography in this area, try this one:

Sarah Mayorga Gallo's Behind the White Picket Fence is about the Creekbridge Neighborhood in Durham. It appears to delve into the details of neighborhood association life

and the final city on our tour is my original hometown of
:

 Austin, TX

History

Austin's history is pretty fascinating, and I haven't read any scholarly work about it at all, I'm ashamed to say.  I have some vague recollections of elementary school tales of some guy named Stephen. BUT. given the time, I'd probably start with one of these:

Elliot Tretter and co's, Shadows of a Sunbelt City is part of a geographies and social justice series and aims to unpack the myths of Austin's "high tech" boosterism. This seems relevant to Atlanta history too, since we have been drawing on this "smart city" magic through GA-Tech and hyper-privatized development initiatives.

Travis Stimmeling's Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks is a history of the New Country music explosion in Austin during the 1960s-1970s., the era when I lived there, and providing the soundtracak to my childhood.

Ethnography:

I have not read  Joshua Long''s, Weird City, but this book is a set of interviews by a sociologist and about the fight to "Keep Austin weird" in light of the aforementioned "high tech" development. It sounds like fun.

I may have been born in Austin, and spent a lot of important growing-up years there, but I admit, I don't have much in the way of book-learning about it. I welcome your suggestions on Austin history or ethnography, or on any of these others locales, dear readers, put them in the comments here.