Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Non-Fiction. This book is a landmark in American political thought. Preeminent Richard Hofstadter examines the passion for progress and reform that colored the entire period from 1890 to 1940 with startling and stimulating results. The Age of Reform searches out the moral and emotional motives of the reformers the myths and dreams in which they believed, and the realities with which they had to compromise.

Most American cities are now administered by appointed city managers and governed by councils chosen in nonpartisan, at-large elections. In the early twentieth century, many urban reformers claimed these structures would make city government more responsive to the popular will. But on the whole, the effects of these reforms have been to make citizens less likely to vote in local elections and local governments less representative of their constituents. How and why did this happen? Ariane Liazos examines the urban reform movement that swept through the country in the early twentieth century and its unintended consequences. Reformers hoped to make cities simultaneously more efficient and more democratic, broadening the scope of what local government should do for residents while also reconsidering how citizens should participate in their governance. However, they increasingly focused on efficiency, appealing to business groups and compromising to avoid controversial and divisive topics, including the voting rights of African Americans and women. Liazos weaves together wide-ranging nationwide analysis with in-depth case studies. She offers nuanced accounts of reform in five cities; details the activities of the National Municipal League, made up of prominent national reformers and political scientists; and analyzes quantitative data on changes in the structures of government in over three hundred cities. Reforming the City is an important study for American history and political development, with powerful insights into the relationships between scholarship and reform and between the structures of city government and urban democracy.

Through a detailed study of the process as it took place in Chengdu, a key provincial capital in the interior, this book shows how urban reformers sought to remake Chinese cities by promoting a new type of orderly and productive urban community in population centers that before had been treated mainly as hubs for trade and seats of central government"--BOOK JACKET.

Education Reform and Gentrification in the Age of #CamdenRising: Public Education and Urban Re-development in Camden, NJ will center current and future resident viewpoints on living in a city whose leadership employs neoliberal tactics in redevelopment and, simultaneously, rebranding public education

This work examines the history of urban planning and administration during modern China's first age of city-centered politics, focusing on the New Policies of the late Qing and the city administration movement of the 1920s. Between 1895 and 1937, the management of cities emerged as one of the chief challenges for the Chinese state. Through a detailed case study, based on newly available archival sources, of the process of urban reform in Chengdu, a key provincial capital in the interior, Kristin Stapleton shows how urban reformers permanently changed urban administration, the urban landscape, and urban life by promoting a new type of orderly and productive community in population centers despite the many upheavals of the late Qing and Republican eras.