Becky M. Nicolaides is an Affiliated Research Scholar at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, a Research Affiliate at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, and the author of My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965. Andrew Wiese is Professor of History at San Diego State University and the author of Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century.
The Suburb Reader is the essential guide to the history of the world’s first suburban nation. Nicolaides and Wiese have assembled an extraordinary collection of documents, illustrations, and maps, augmented with well-chosen essays by field-defining scholars. I can’t wait to teach this book. —Thomas J. Sugrue, Kahn Professor of History and Sociology, University of Pennsylvania This fabulous collection brings together richly textured documents and classic scholarly essays to illuminate how the United States became a suburban nation. Ideally suited for students, scholars, and general readers, the book includes multiple views of the suburbs—pro and con—and delves deeply into issues of race, class, gender, and politics. The Suburb Reader enriches our understanding not only of suburbia, but of America itself. —Elaine Tyler May, author of Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era