He describes subdivision design innovations and the use of deed restrictions, limits on building heights, and neighborhood zoning protection to control ever-increasing urban growth.

"Boston's antebellum period was a historical watershed in every way. The city's economy was growing dramatically, compulsory education was well underway, the Irish were coming, crime was soaring, and the lower criminal courts were expanding sharply." "A resurgent bar association struggled to professionalize by shifting from the time-honored method of training lawyers via apprenticeships to requiring formal education in law schools. The Municipal Court redefined its mission by adding regulatory disputes to the docket and diverting minor cases into extra-legal channels. As it adopted a proactive stance, the court became a dispute resolution center, the prosecutor learned to manage caseflow closely and to set punishments via plea bargaining, and the court's docket grew tenfold by 1850. Minor regulatory disputes and minor vice were quietly transferred to the Police Court, and its cases more than doubled by 1850. All this took place between 1830 and 1850." "Crime also took several interesting turns. Youthful criminals and wayward children roamed the streets with impunity during the 1830s, and by 1850 they accounted for the major portion of Boston's property losses. Prohibition was a divisive issue, and liquor laws and their violations proliferated. Expanding commerce brought many opportunities for fraud, and it too became a common charge. Public drunkenness and prostitution mounted, and though the much-maligned Irish aggravated many of these problems, they by no means caused Boston's first crime wave." "Antebellum Boston witnessed the birth of the modern criminal court--a high-volume, multipurposed, criminal court using plea bargaining to dispose of the bulk of its cases. As Boston's courts moved to plea bargaining, the court's officers also became more professional, and its formal procedures grew more intricate. These contrary tendencies were unrelated in Boston." "Some might draw from the rapid expansion of Boston's criminal justice system that the community was mounting a puritanical repression of vice and the dangerous classes, but it was not simply a matter of putting immorality down. It was a calling to account of all classes by means of a just legal system that assigned punishment according to guilt. Though the Irish were assailed on all sides, they were treated fairly in the city's legal institutions. Boston's lower criminal courts were a worthy example for the nation as a whole during the antebellum years."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

While white residents of antebellum Boston and New Haven forcefully opposed the education of black residents, their counterparts in slaveholding Baltimore did little to resist the establishment of African American schools. Such discrepancies, Hilary Moss argues, suggest that white opposition to black education was not a foregone conclusion. Through the comparative lenses of these three cities, she shows why opposition erupted where it did across the United States during the same period that gave rise to public education. As common schooling emerged in the 1830s, providing white children of all classes and ethnicities with the opportunity to become full-fledged citizens, it redefined citizenship as synonymous with whiteness. This link between school and American identity, Moss argues, increased white hostility to black education at the same time that it spurred African Americans to demand public schooling as a means of securing status as full and equal members of society. Shedding new light on the efforts of black Americans to learn independently in the face of white attempts to withhold opportunity, Schooling Citizens narrates a previously untold chapter in the thorny history of America’s educational inequality.

Five historians uncover the ties between people's daily routines and the all-encompassing framework of their lives. They trace the processes of social construction in Western Europe, the United States, Latin America, Africa, and China, discussing both the historical similarities and the ways in which individual history has shaped each area's development. They stress the need for a social history that connects individuals to major ideological, political, and economic transformations.

In this twenty-fifth anniversary edition of his prize-winning book, Dawley reflects once more on labor and class issues, poverty and progress, and the contours of urban history in the city of Lynn, Massachusetts, during the rise of industrialism in the early nineteenth century. He not only revisits this urban conglomeration, but also seeks out previously unheard groups such as women and blacks. The result is a more rounded portrait of a small eastern city on the verge of becoming modern.

Since the late 18th century, when they first entered into an alliance during the American Revolution, the French and Americans have had a long and sometimes stormy relationship based on a complex mix of mutual admiration, cultural criticism, and sometimes downright disgust for the “other.” The relatively new interdisciplinary field of imagology, or image studies, allows us to place the dynamics of such a relationship into perspective by grounding its analysis firmly in the study of national stereotypes, in the process providing new insights into the mentality of the observer. For if anything, image studies demonstrate again and again that national character is not–as assumed uncritically for centuries–an innate essence of the “other”, but rather a self-serving functional construct of the observer.

This book is a sociological portrait of Marseille during the epochal changes of the nineteenth century. Sewell establishes a systematic quantitative description of some of the most important social structures of nineteenth-century Marseille. Although deeply influenced by sociological methods and theories, the volume is written on the basis of readability and simplicity, and therefore has much to offer to the historian as well as the sociologist.