History, Politics and Current Events, Reviews

Review: Kruse and Sugrue, The New Suburban History

jacket imageSuburban history? Christopher Shea ponders that phrase in a review in the Sunday edition of the Boston Globe: “What the suburbs never seem like is a setting for history. Dismissed as places without a sense of place, they also seem timeless, in a bad sense: Except for the square footage, what separates the Levittown of the 1950s from a new cookie-cutter subdivision? But though the subject doesn’t have the sexiness of the Civil War or Jacksonian democracy, a growing number of historians are taking a close look at the `burbs.”
Shea discusses The New Suburban History edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue, saying the book “serves as a manifesto on the importance of the subject. … The suburbs, in this new perspective, have as much to do with 20th-century social and political movements as do Birmingham or South Boston.”