This special issue of American Quarterly focuses on Los Angeles as an emblematic site through which the scholarship of American studies can be examined. As a city shaped by eighteenth-century European colonization, nineteenth-century U.S. territorial expansion, and twentieth-century migration, Los Angeles has come to embody both the hopes and fears of Americans looking to the future. It is a city in which the local is deployed in complex practices of identity and community formation within the broader networks of globalization that continue to define and redefine what constitutes America. The articles in this volume address the complexities of the city's social geography across time, particularly since World War II. The collection reflects an exciting variety of cultural studies perspectives and reveals the synergistic possibilities of current Los Angeles studies and American studies in general. American Quarterly includes interdisciplinary scholarship that engages key issues in American studies. Publishing essays that examine American societies and cultures in global and local contexts, the journal contributes to the understanding of the United States, its diversity, and its impact on world politics and culture.

This innovative text uses the lens of culture to examine the various theoretical perspectives and paradigms of urban analysis. It explores the city's impact on how we make and consume all types of culture—art, music, literature, architecture, film, and more—not only illustrating the effects the urban environment has on the production of culture, but, at times, how culture has influenced the city. Theoretically diverse, Urban Culture employs the major theoretical perspectives in sociology and the major paradigms in Urban Sociology and Urban Studies: Urban Ecology, Marxism, New Urbanism, Socio-Psychological Perspective, Structuralists/Econometrics, and Urban Elites/ Entrepreneurs. Urban Terrorism is also addressed to provide a timely examination of the cultural impact and sociological effects of terrorism in an urban setting.

As the world’s urban populations grow, cities become spaces where increasingly diverse peoples negotiate such differences as language, citizenship, ethnicity and race, class and wealth, and gender. Using a comparative framework, Urban Diversity examines the multiple meanings of inclusion and exclusion in fast-changing urban contexts. The contributors identify specific areas of contestation, including public spaces and facilities, governmental structures, civil society institutions, cultural organizations, and cyberspace. The contributors also explore the socioeconomic and cultural mechanisms that can encourage inclusive pluralism in the world’s cities, seeking approaches that view diversity as an asset rather than a threat. Exploring old and new public spaces, practices of marginalized urban dwellers, and actions of the state, the contributors to Urban Diversity assess the formation and reformation of processes of inclusion, whether through deliberate actions intended to rejuvenate democratic political institutions or the spontaneous reactions of city residents.

Glossy magazines write about them, celebrities give their names to them, and you’d better believe there’s an app (or ten) committed to finding you the right one. They are New York City restaurants and food shops. And their journey to international notoriety is a captivating one. The now-booming food capital was once a small seaport city, home to a mere six municipal food markets that were stocked by farmers, fishermen, and hunters who lived in the area. By 1890, however, the city’s population had grown to more than one million, and residents could dine in thousands of restaurants with a greater abundance and variety of options than any other place in the United States. Historians, sociologists, and foodies alike will devour the story of the origins of New York City’s food industry in Urban Appetites. Cindy R. Lobel focuses on the rise of New York as both a metropolis and a food capital, opening a new window onto the intersection of the cultural, social, political, and economic transformations of the nineteenth century. She offers wonderfully detailed accounts of public markets and private food shops; basement restaurants and immigrant diners serving favorites from the old country; cake and coffee shops; and high-end, French-inspired eating houses made for being seen in society as much as for dining. But as the food and the population became increasingly cosmopolitan, corruption, contamination, and undeniably inequitable conditions escalated. Urban Appetites serves up a complete picture of the evolution of the city, its politics, and its foodways.

Urban subcultures have joined together to become something larger, more powerful, and more pervasive than ever before. Our new global urban culture, street culture at its broadest, is its force. The more than 1,000 photographs featured here together form a journey, a record, and an inspiration. The world's streets are its most vibrant sites of visual creativity, and amid their crush are photographers, documenting, creating, and collectively bringing this book to you. Their stories are the stories of the interconnectedness of global street culture. Travel and exploration are near the essence of street cultures, and the travelers who have used their passions to cross the boundaries of nations are at the heart of the process of cultural exchange.--[from publisher's description].

Royce Hanson traces the impact of civic culture in Dallas on the city's handling of major crises in education, policing, and management of urban development over the past forty years and shows the reciprocal effect of responses to crises on the development of civic capital."--BOOK JACKET.

The Power of Ethnic Places discusses the growing visibility of ethnic heritage places in U.S. society. The book examines a spectrum of case studies of Chinese, Latino and African American communities in the U.S., disagreeing with any perceptions that the rise of ethnic enclaves and heritage places are harbingers of separatism or balkanization. Instead, the text argues that by better understanding the power and dynamics of ethnic enclaves and heritage places in our society, we as a society will be better prepared to harness the economic and cultural changes related to globalization rather than be hurt or divided by these same forces of economic and cultural restructuring.