Roger W. Lotchin

World War II and Urban California: City Planning and The Transformation Hypothesis

In recent years, the topic of war and society has made considerable strides in European historiography, and it is beginning to make an impression on American historiography.1 In general, urban historians have not yet discovered this interesting subfield. Somewhat surprisingly, however, the field of war and society has witnessed considerable debate. One says surprisingly because, at first glance, one could easily consider war to be a collective disaster. John U. Nef has perhaps given the classic modern voice to the argument that war is not essential to societies in his 1952 book entitled War and Human Progress.2 Although conflict may distribute isolated windfalls, the surface evidence of war would seem to be overwhelmingly negative. One has only to read of the street fighting in Stalingrad in 1942-1943 to get a glimpse of the physical destruction of war upon cities.

World War II and the growth of southern city planning: a gigantic force?

Many historians believe that war produces revolutionary or at least extraordinary change. That would seem to be true of some wars in a military sense and sometimes in a diplomatic sense. However, the picture of non-military change is not so clear for every society. Since World War II had such a great impact on American cities, the experience of cities seems like an ideal realm in which to test the degree of change. Since city planning is one of the premier modern urban professions, gauging the impact on city planning is a good place to begin. This article argues that southern city planning experienced only modest changes during the World War II. The war did create considerable growth in a few southern cities. However, the vast majority of them did not grow and usually declined. In the boom cities, the war created disorderly conditions, inimical to good city planning. On the other hand, the cities that declined made modest progress in planning, mainly in establishing amateur planning commissions and adopting zoning laws. These relatively tranquil cities laid the foundations for planning development, while the boom cities just tried to keep their heads above water. The dramatic changes that war caused to other aspects of historical experience did not touch southern city planning.

Hispanics, Women, and Western Cities: "Setting the Pace"- Political Emergence and the Renaissance of Western Exceptionalism

7 HE SNOW FELL IN RECORD AMOUNTS, crippling Chicago in the midst of a hotly contested election. Heavy snowfall was not unusual in the City of the Broad Shoulders; what was noteworthy was that it did not seem to be picked up. The white banks grew upward and outward on the streets, filling sidewalks and parking spaces. Mayor Michael Bilandic, successor to the legendary Richard J. Daley, tried frantically to move his bureaucracy to respond to the crisis, but still the snowdrifts grew, bringing the city to a standstill. And all the while a little lady in a plain cloth coat shivered in the cold at the elevated stations, the bus stops, and street corers, wherever there was a crowd, reminding the voters that the snow had formerly been removed without crisis. She further opined that people ought not be forced to buy cracked eggs from the ghetto food chains, pay exorbitant fees to the Yellow Cab Company, be threatened with eviction if they voted wrong, or, in the case of two women, trade sex for public jobs. On 16 April 1979, the same woman, Jane Byrne,

The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900.

Preface Introduction: The public city: American political culture in nineteenth-century San Francisco 1. The agony of authority: people, public, party, and power, 1849-1859 2. Republican terror: the origins of vigilante movements of 1851 and 1856 3. Though the heavens fall: the vigilante movement culture of 1856 4. Race and reaction: civil war political mobilization 5. The postwar reconstruction of the urban public sphere 6. A language of politics in a politics of class: the workingmens party of California and the twilight of republicanism 7. The institutional preconditions of progressivism 8. Progressivism as the politics of needs: the mobilization of group identities Conclusion Appendix Tables Bibliography.