Mike Davis shows us where the city's money comes from and who controls it while also exposing the brutal ongoing struggle between L.A.'s haves and have-nots.

    Every map is accompanied by contemporary scenes and views, so that the reader obtains an unravelled picture of the city in all its stages of development. The text and captions provide an anecdotal commentary, full of unexpected and unfamiliar details for those who already know and love the capital, and with a clear outline of London's history for those new to the city.

    Today Americans are lamenting the erosion of his ideal. What happened in the intervening centuries? Daniel Kemmis argues that our loss of capacity for public life (which impedes our ability to resolve crucial issues) parallels our loss of a sense of place. A renewed sense of inhabitation, he maintains —of community rooted in place and of people dwelling in that place in a practiced way—can shape politics into a more cooperative and more humanly satisfying enterprise, producing better people, better communities, and better places.The author emphasizes the importance of place by analyzing problems and possibilities of public life in a particular place— those northern states whose settlement marked the end of the old frontier. National efforts to “keep citizens apart” by encouraging them to develop open country and rely upon impersonal, procedural methods for public problems have bred stalemate, frustration, and alienation. As alternatives he suggests how western patterns of inhabitation might engender a more cooperative, face-to-face practice of public life.Community and the Politics of Place also examines our ambivalence about the relationship between cities and rural areas and about the role of corporations in public life. The book offers new insight into the relationship between politics and economics and addresses the question of whether the nation-state is an appropriate entity for the practice of either discipline. The author draws upon the growing literature of civic republicanism for both a language and a vantage point from which to address problems in American public life, but he criticizes that literature for its failure to consider place.Though its focus on a single region lends concreteness to its discussions, Community and the Politics of Place promotes a better understanding of the quality of public life today in all regions of the United States.

    Charles Little's Greenways for America describes this remarkable citizen-led effort to get Americans out of their cars and into the landscape via greenways. Such greenways provide paths or trails for recreation and link a region's traditional parks and open spaces. They preserve natural corridors for wildlife migration and protect scenic and historic routes from commercial development. In this first comprehensive account of the movement that is now gathering power in every region of the country, Little describes dozens of greenway projects that have imporved environmental quality, invigorated local economies, and preserved outdoor spaces for millions of citizen.s

    Billy G. Smith demonstrates how the "lower sort" (as they were called by their contemporaries) struggled to carve out meaningful lives during an era of vast change stretching from the Seven Years' War, through the turbulent events surrounding the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution, into the first decade of the new nation.

    Moving beyond traditional local histories, which tend to focus on powerful families, Anderson integrates the stories of well-known figures with those of ordinary men and women, blacks and whites, to create a complex and fascinating portrait of Durham’s economic, political, social, and labor history. Drawing on extensive primary research, she examines the origins of the town of Durham and recounts the growth of communities around mills, stores, taverns, and churches in the century before the rise of tobacco manufacturing. A historical narrative encompassing the coming of the railroad; the connection between the Civil War and the rise of the tobacco industry; the Confederate surrender at Bennett Place; the relocation of Trinity College to Durham and, later, its renaming as Duke University; and the growth of health-service and high-technology industries in the decades after the development of Research Triangle Park, this second edition of Durham County is a remarkably comprehensive work.