A unique panoramic survey of ethnic groups throughout the United States that explores the diverse communities in every region, state, and big city. Race, ethnicity, and immigrants' lives and identity: these are all key topics that Americans need to study in order to fully understand U.S. culture, society, politics, economics, and history. Learning about "place" through our own historical and contemporary neighborhoods is an ideal way to better grasp the important role of race and ethnicity in the United States. This reference work comprehensively covers both historical and contemporary ethnic and immigrant neighborhoods through A–Z entries that explore the places and people in every major U.S. region and neighborhood. America's Changing Neighborhoods: An Exploration of Diversity uniquely combines the history of ethnic groups with the history of communities, offering an interdisciplinary examination of the nation's makeup. It gives readers perspective and insight into ethnicity and race based on the geography of enclaves across the nation, in regions and in specific cities or localized areas within a city. Among the entries are nearly 200 "neighborhood biographies" that provide histories of local communities and their ethnic groups. Images, sidebars, cross-references at the end of each entry, and cross-indexing of entries serve readers conducting preliminary as well as in-depth research. The book's state-by-state entries also offer population data, and an appendix of ancestry statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau details ethnic and racial diversity.

Northern whites in the post–World War II era began to support the principle of civil rights, so why did many of them continue to oppose racial integration in their communities? Challenging conventional wisdom about the growth, prosperity, and racial exclusivity of American suburbs, David M. P. Freund argues that previous attempts to answer this question have overlooked a change in the racial thinking of whites and the role of suburban politics in effecting this change. In Colored Property, he shows how federal intervention spurred a dramatic shift in the language and logic of residential exclusion—away from invocations of a mythical racial hierarchy and toward talk of markets, property, and citizenship. Freund begins his exploration by tracing the emergence of a powerful public-private alliance that facilitated postwar suburban growth across the nation with federal programs that significantly favored whites. Then, showing how this national story played out in metropolitan Detroit, he visits zoning board and city council meetings, details the efforts of neighborhood “property improvement” associations, and reconstructs battles over race and housing to demonstrate how whites learned to view discrimination not as an act of racism but as a legitimate response to the needs of the market. Illuminating government’s powerful yet still-hidden role in the segregation of U.S. cities, Colored Property presents a dramatic new vision of metropolitan growth, segregation, and white identity in modern America.

From the farm and orchard lands of the mid-1880s to the Civil War encampments, from modest wood frame homes to vast residences of Victorian splendor, the area surrounding the closely located Logan, Scott, and Thomas Circles has for many years been at the center of a rich history. Comprising a diverse architectural and social heritage, these neighborhoods have played a part in the great story of the capital city and have been home to the workingman and woman, the wealthy, the middle class, and the politically powerful alike. Following their use as the site of hangman's gallows for Civil War traitors, all three circles evolved into lush parks surrounded by the elegant, Victorian-era homes that housed nearly all of the nation's elite by the 1890s. Prior to the turn of the twentieth century, these neighborhoods were home to Washington's most influential citizens-pioneers and politicians, generals and industrialists-and, in the 1930s, to well-known leaders of the city's African-American community, such as Mary McLeod Bethune and Bishop Charles M. "Sweet Daddy" Grace. Logan Circle survives much as it was today, but many readers will not recognize the early homes, now long gone, that once surrounded Scott and Thomas Circles and have since been replaced by office buildings, hotels, and commercial establishments. Fortunately, a compelling visual record of the development of Logan, Scott, and Thomas Circles remains.

Volume 1. States and neighborhoods A-E -- Volume 2. Neighborhoods F-L -- Volume 3. Neighborhoods M-Y

The story of white flight and the neglect of Black urban neighborhoods has been well told by urban historians in recent decades. Yet much of this scholarship has downplayed Black agency and tended to portray African Americans as victims of structural forces beyond their control. In this history of Cleveland's Black middle class, Todd Michney uncovers the creative ways that members of this nascent community established footholds in areas outside the overcrowded, inner-city neighborhoods to which most African Americans were consigned. In asserting their right to these outer-city spaces, African Americans appealed to city officials, allied with politically progressive whites (notably Jewish activists), and relied upon both Black and white developers and real estate agents to expand these "surrogate suburbs" and maintain their livability until the bona fide suburbs became more accessible. By tracking the trajectories of those who, in spite of racism, were able to succeed, Michney offers a valuable counterweight to histories that have focused on racial conflict and Black poverty and tells the neglected story of the Black middle class in America's cities prior to the 1960s.

Vol. 12 (from May 1876 to May 1877) includes: Researches in telephony / by A. Graham Bell.