Making A Second Urban History

This article suggests that Arnold Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto has been particularly pathbreaking for the field of urban history, as well as for other urban disciplines, primarily because its probing and detailed examination of postwar Chicago exploded several widely held academic assumptions about race relations, political consensus, the “ghetto” as a “natural” or “inevitable” entity, and so forth. In addition, this work sparked new scholarly interest in America’s urban centers and deeply influenced the sorts of questions that academics now ask about cities in the past.