Around the world, blue-collar politics have become associated with resistance to the multicultural. While this may also be true in Edinburgh, Scotland, a closer look reveals the growth of liberal democratic ideals in the working-class population, which has a much different goal: How can this European city keep the entrepreneurial forces of globalization from commodifying what is distinctly theirs? In Tenement Nation, Christa Ballard Tooley explores the battle for a neighborhood called the Canongate in Edinburgh's Old Town. Tooley's insightful study of the working-class Canongate community as they negotiate gentrification plans offers a complex view of class and nation. The threat of the Canongate's redevelopment motivated many throughout Edinburgh to lend their support to the residents' campaign. Against such development projects, alliances formed between upper-class heritage supporters and working-class urban residents, all of whom turned to institutions such as the European Union and UNESCO for support in restricting commercial development. Tenement Nation explores these negotiations between socioeconomic classes and even nationalities to show what Tooley calls a "working-class cosmopolitanism" in pursuit of social, economic, and political inclusion.

I trace my ancestry back to the Mayflower, writes Andrew S. Dolkart. Not to the legendary ship that brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, but to the more prosaic tenement on the southeast corner of East Broadway and Clinton Street named the Mayflower, where my father was born in 1914 to Russian-Jewish immigrants. For Dolkart, the experience of being raised in a tenement became a metaphor for the life that was afforded countless thousands of other immigrant children growing up in Lower Manhattan during the past century and more. Dolkart presents for us a precise and informative biography of a typical tenement house in New York City that became, in 1988, the site for the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Dolkart documents, analyzes, and interprets the architectural and social history of this building at 97 Orchard Street, starting in the 1860s when it was erected, moving on to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the neighborhood started to change, and concluding in the present day as the building is reincarnated as the museum. children, who were part of the transformation of New York City and the fabric of everyday American urban life.