"The government in the past created one American Dream at the expense of almost all others: the dream of a house, a lawn, a picket fence, two children, and a car. But there is no single American Dream anymore." For nearly 70 years, the suburbs were as American as apple pie. As the middle class ballooned and single-family homes and cars became more affordable, we flocked to pre-fabricated communities in the suburbs, a place where open air and solitude...

"American suburbs are not the homogeneous places we sometimes take them for. Today's suburbs are racially, ethnically, and economically diverse with as many Democratic as Republican voters, a growing population of renters, and rising poverty. The cliché of white picket fences is well past its expiration date. The history of suburbia is equally surprising: American suburbs were once fertile ground for utopian planning, communal living, socially-conscious...

Focuses on the individual and the suburban communities within each of the 75 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. Provides profiles of numerous suburban communities with a 10,000+ population.

"Most accounts of post-1950s political history tell the story of of the war on drugs as part of a racial system of social control of urban minority populations, an extension of the federal war on black street crime and the foundation for the "new Jim Crow" of mass incarceration as key characteristics of the U.S. in this period. But as the Nixon White House understood, and as the Carter and Reagan administrations also learned, there were not nearly...

"This is a work of American history and cultural studies in which the author examines how Americans imagined and regulated suburban space in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1970s, rising crime, environmental threats, and conflicts over the use of public space made suburbanites feel threatened. And the technologies of cable television, VCRs, and video games brought representations of these threats into suburban homes. The...