More comprehensive than any other book on this topic, Los Angeles and the Automobile places the evolution of Los Angeles within the context of American political and urban history.

As people crowded into British cities in the nineteenth century, industrial and biological waste byproducts, and then epidemic followed. Britons died by the thousands in recurring plagues. Figures like Edwin Chadwick and John Snow pleaded for measures that could save lives and preserve the social fabric. In London: Water and the Making of the Modern City, John Broich follows the politically charged and arduous task of bringing a municipal water supply to one of the world's most complex urban environments.

A fresh look at the greatest builder in the history of New York City and one of its most controversial figures. “We are rebuilding New York, not dispersing and abandoning it”: Robert Moses saw himself on a rescue mission to save the city from obsolescence, decentralization, and decline. His vast building program aimed to modernize urban infrastructure, expand the public realm with extensive recreational facilities, remove blight, and make the city more livable for the middle class. This book offers a fresh look at the physical transformation of New York during Moses’s nearly forty-year reign over city building from 1934 to 1968.It is hard to imagine that anyone will ever have the same impact on New York as did Robert Moses. In his various roles in city and state government, he reshaped the fabric of the city, and his legacy continues to touch the lives of all New Yorkers. Revered for most of his life, he is now one of the most controversial figures in the city’s history. Robert Moses and the Modern City is the first major publication devoted to him since Robert Caro’s damning 1974 biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.In these pages eight short essays by leading scholars of urban history provide a revised perspective; stunning new photographs offer the first visual record of Moses’s far-reaching building program as it stands today; and a comprehensive catalog of his works is illustrated with a wealth of archival records: photographs of buildings, neighborhoods, and landscapes, of parks, pools, and playgrounds, of demolished neighborhoods and replacement housing and urban renewal projects, of bridges and highways; renderings of rejected designs and controversial projects that were defeated; and views of spectacular models that have not been seen since Moses made them for promotional purposes.Robert Moses and the Modern City captures research undertaken in the last three decades and will stimulate a new round of debate.

Julia Guarneri's book considers turn-of-the-century newspapers in New York, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Chicago not just as vessels of information but as active agents in the creation of cities and of urban culture. Guarneri argues that newspapers sparked cultural, social, and economic shifts that transformed a rural republic into a nation of cities, and that transformed rural people into self-identified metropolitans and moderns. The book pays closest attention to the content and impact of "feature news," such as advice columns, neighborhood tours, women's pages, comic strips, and Sunday magazines. While papers provided a guide to individual upward mobility, they also fostered a climate of civic concern and responsibility. Editors drew in new reading audiences--women, immigrants, and working-class readers--giving rise to the diverse, contentious, and commercial public sphere of the twentieth century.

A survey of urbanization and the making of modern Europe from the mid-eighteenth century to the First World War.

Elisha Graves Otis invented the safe elevator almost by accident. In doing so he made possible the construction of the skyscraper and laid the technical foundation for dynamic urban centers around the world.

"To Live and Dine in L.A. is a project of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, based On The Menu Collection of The Los Angeles Public Library. This lavish pictorial work celebrates the rich - and untold - history of restaurants and food in the City of Angels"--