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Author: Herbert J. Gans Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 023154264X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 709
Book Description
In 1955, Levitt and Sons purchased most of Willingboro Township, New Jersey and built 11,000 homes. This, their third Levittown, became the site of one of urban sociology's most famous community studies, Herbert J. Gans's The Levittowners. The product of two years of living in Levittown, the work chronicles the invention of a new community and its major institutions, the beginnings of social and political life, and the former city residents' adaptation to suburban living. Gans uses his research to reject the charge that suburbs are sterile and pathological. First published in 1967, The Levittowners is a classic of participant-observer ethnography that also paints a sensitive portrait of working-class and lower-middle-class life in America. This new edition features a foreword by Harvey Molotch that reflects on Gans's challenges to conventional wisdom.
Author: Herbert J. Gans Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 023154264X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 709
Book Description
In 1955, Levitt and Sons purchased most of Willingboro Township, New Jersey and built 11,000 homes. This, their third Levittown, became the site of one of urban sociology's most famous community studies, Herbert J. Gans's The Levittowners. The product of two years of living in Levittown, the work chronicles the invention of a new community and its major institutions, the beginnings of social and political life, and the former city residents' adaptation to suburban living. Gans uses his research to reject the charge that suburbs are sterile and pathological. First published in 1967, The Levittowners is a classic of participant-observer ethnography that also paints a sensitive portrait of working-class and lower-middle-class life in America. This new edition features a foreword by Harvey Molotch that reflects on Gans's challenges to conventional wisdom.
Author: David Kushner Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 0802719732 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
In the decade after World War II, one entrepreneurial family helped thousands of people buy into the American dream of owning a home, not just any home, but a good one, with all the modern conveniences. The Levitts--two brothers, William and Alfred, and their father, Abe--pooled their talents in land use, architecture, and sales to create story book town with affordable little houses. They laid out the welcome mat, but not to everyone. Levittown had a whites-only policy. This is the story that unfolded in Levittown, PA, one unseasonably hot summer in 1957 on a quiet street called Deepgreen Lane. There, a white Jewish Communist family named Wechsler secretly arranged for a black family, the Myers, to buy the little pink house next door. What followed was an explosive summer of violence that would transform their lives, and the nation. It would lead to the downfall of a titan, and the integration of the most famous suburb in the world. It's a story of hope and fear, invention and rebellion, and the power that comes when ordinary people take an extraordinary stand.
Author: Richard G. Wagner Publisher: Arcadia Publishing ISBN: 9780738572765 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 132
Book Description
In 1951, Levittown was created in Bucks County outside of Philadelphia by builder pioneers Levitt and Sons; a superb collection of history and photographs illustrates the birth and growth of this unique area, explores the community that resulted and features residents' personal memories of the golden years. Original.
Author: Dianne Harris Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press ISBN: 0822977826 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 446
Book Description
Carved from eight square miles of Bucks County farmland northeast of Philadelphia, Levittown, Pennsylvania, is a symbol of postwar suburbia and the fulfillment of the American Dream. Begun in 1952, after the completion of an identically named community on Long Island, the second Levittown soon eclipsed its New York counterpart in scale and ambition, yet it continues to live in the shadow of its better-known sister and has received limited scholarly attention. Second Suburb uncovers the unique story of Levittown, Pennsylvania, and its significance to American social, architectural, environmental, and political history. The volume offers a fascinating profile of this planned community in two parts. The first examines Levittown from the inside, including oral histories of residents recalling how Levittown shaped their lives. One such reminiscence is by Daisy Myers, part of the first African American family to move to the community, only to become the targets of a race riot that would receive international publicity. The book also includes selections from the syndicated comic strip Zippy the Pinhead, in which Bill Griffith reflects on the angst-ridden trials of growing up in a Levittown, and an extensive photo essay of neighborhood homes, schools, churches, parks, and swimming pools, collected by Dianne Harris. The second part of the book views Levittown from the outside. Contributors consider the community's place in planning and architectural history and the Levitts' strategies for the mass production of housing. Other chapters address the class stratification of neighborhood sections through price structuring; individual attempts to personalize a home's form and space as a representation of class and identity; the builders' focus on the kitchen as the centerpiece of the home and its greatest selling point; the community's environmental and ecological legacy; racist and exclusionary sales policies; resident activism during the gas riots of 1979; and "America's lost Eden." Bringing together some of the top scholars in architectural history, American studies, and landscape studies, Second Suburb explores the surprisingly rich interplay of design, technology, and social response that marks the emergence and maturation of an exceptionally potent rendition of the American Dream.
Author: Herbert J. Gans Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231545096 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 378
Book Description
This collection of recent essays by the influential sociologist Herbert J. Gans brings together the many themes of Gans’s wide-ranging career to make the case for a policy-oriented vision for sociology. Sociology and Social Policy explicates and helps solve social problems by presenting a range of studies on what people, institutions, and social structures do with, for, and against one another. These works from across Gans’s areas of interest—the city, poverty, ethnicity, employment and political economy, and the relationship between race and class—together make a powerful call to action for the field of sociology.
Author: Herbert J. Gans Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 9780231513272 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 490
Book Description
The primary theme of this collection of essays is that the cities' basic problems are poverty and racism, and until these concerns are addressed by bringing about racial equality, creating jobs, and instituting other reforms, the generally low quality of urban life will persist. Gans argues that the individual must work to alter society. He believes that not only must parents have jobs to improve their children's school performance, but that the country needs a modernized "New Deal," a more labor-intensive economy, and a thirty-two hour work week to achieve full employment. Other controversial ideas presented in this book include Gans's opposition to the whole notion of an underclass, which he feels is the latest way for the nonpoor to unjustly label the poor as undeserving. He also believes that poverty continues to plague society because it is often useful to the nonpoor. He is critical of architecture that aims above all to be aesthetic or to make philosophical statements, is doubtful that planners can or should try to reform our social or personal lives, and thinks we should concentrate on achieving individual public policies until we learn how to properly plan as a society.
Author: Herbert J. Gans
Author: Herbert J. Gans
Author: David Kushner
Author: Richard G. Wagner
Author: Dianne Harris
Author: Levittown Civic Association. Incorporation Study Committee
Author: Herbert J. Gans
Author: Herbert J. Gans
Author: Frank Loel Sweetser
Author: Gary B. Nash
Author: Peter Isaac Rose