Sam Bass Warner

Sam Bass Warner, Jr., examines the historical roots of the major economic and social problems facing the U.S. in the 1990s. He documents the efforts, both failed and successful, to provide for basic human needs in the urban context, especially for decent housing and health care. For this edition, Warner provides a new preface and Charles Tilly a new foreword. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.

How did educated Westerners make an enemy of an inspiration that has changed the lives of billions? Why is nationalism synonymous with atavism, fanaticism, xenophobia, and bloodshed? In this book, Robert Wiebe argues that we too often conflate nationalism with what states do in its name. By indiscriminately blaming it for terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and military thuggery, we avoid reckoning with nationalism for what it is: the desire among people who believe they share a common ancestry and destiny to live under their own government on land sacred to their history. For at least a century and a half, nationalism has been an effective answer to basic questions of identity and connection in a fluid world. It quiets fears of cultural disintegration and allows people to pursue closer bonds and seek freedom. By looking at nationalism in this clearer light and by juxtaposing it with its two great companion and competitor movements--democracy and socialism--Wiebe is able to understand nationalism's deep appeal and assess its historical record. Because Europeans and their kin abroad monopolized nationalism before World War I, Wiebe begins with their story, identifying migration as a motive force and examining related developments in state building, race theory, church ambition, and linguistic innovation. After case studies of Irish, German, and Jewish nationalism, Wiebe moves to the United States. He discusses America's distinctive place in transatlantic history, emphasizing its liberal government, cultural diversity, and racism. He then traces nationalism's spread worldwide, evaluating its adaptability and limits on that adaptability. The state-dominated nationalism of Japan, Turkey, and Mexico are considered, followed by Pan-Africanism and Nigeria's anticolonial-postcolonial nationalism. Finally, Wiebe shows how nationalism became integrated into a genuinely global process by the 1970s, only to find itself competing at a disadvantage with god- and gun-driven alternatives. This book's original answers to imperative questions will meet with deep admiration and controversy. They will also change the terms on which nationalism is debated for years to come.

In "The Exploding Metropolis", first published in 1958, William H. Whyte, Jane Jacobs, Francis Bello, Seymour Freedgood, and Daniel Seligman address the problems of urban decline and suburban sprawl, transportation, city politics, open space, and the character and fabric of cities. A new foreword by Sam Bass Warner, Jr., and preface by Whyte demonstrate the relevance of "The Exploding Metropolis" to urban issues in the 90s.

This book is about some of the largest events of the twentieth century, about international war, economic collapse, new science and technologies, and about the transformation of an old mill town region into a modern American metropolis. But it sees those sweeping changes through the eyes of fourteen particular Bostonians, in an ambitious attempt to understand the disorienting experiences of recent history. These lives span the years from 1850 to 1980, a time when Boston, like all American cities, was being rebuilt according to the continually changing specifications of science, engineering, mass wealth, and big corporations.From Boston Brahmins to self-made millionaires, Sam Warner, Jr., brings us into the diverse worlds of Robert Grant, judge and popular novelist; Mary Antin, mystic and advocate for immigrants; Fred Allen, radio comedian; Charles A. Stone and Edwin S. Webster, electrical engineers; Laura Elizabeth Richards, reformist clubwoman; Emily Greene Balch, economist and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize; William Madison Wood, textile magnate; Fred Erwin Beal, socialist labor organizer; Louise Andrews Kent, suburban housewife and writer; Vannevar Bush, science administrator; Laurence K. Marshall, electronics entrepreneur; James Bryant Conant, university president and educational reformer; and Rachel Carson, renowned science writer.These varied lives have been deftly brought together to illuminate the many contradictory qualifies of today’s metropolitan life: ambitions for education and pervasive social neglect; conspicuous luxuries and endemic poverty; elaborate science and a poisoned environment; far-reaching cooperative networks of strangers and narrow, segregated neighborhoods; the multiplication of women’s roles and the entrapment of women in the home.Individual experience—how one person lived as a child in a family and in a particular place, how people did their work—can bring renewed insight to the conflicts of modern life. This engrossing story speaks from an urge to recapture history through human lives and to examine its meaning as authentic experience. As Alfred Kazin expresses it, we are a nation of men and women who have endeavored to escape traditions, and therefore self-discovery is our preoccupation and delight.

In the last third of the nineteenth century Boston grew from a crowded merchant town, in which nearly everybody walked to work, to the modern divided metropolis. The street railway created this division of the metropolis into an inner city of commerce and slums and an outer city of commuters’ suburbs. Streetcar Suburbs tells who built the new city, and why, and how.Included here is a new Introduction that considers the present suburb/city dichotomy and suggests what we can learn from it to assure a livable city of the future.