Cities of the heartland : the rise and fall of the industrial Midwest /

This is the best available study of midwestern cities of the US from the 1830s to the 1980s. Teaford (Purdue Univ.) has included cities of all sizes and types, from Akron, Ann Arbor, and Aurora, to Wyandotte, Youngstown, and Zanesville. Minneapolis, Omaha, Des Moines, and Kansas City are excluded, but St. Louis is well covered. Teaford, an authority on city government, handles that aspect of urban history well. He is also strong on boosterism, economic structures, labor relations, ethnicity, social life, and high culture. Transportation, education, and federal relations, however, are given cursory coverage. The last pages rely on current newspapers and periodicals, and the sections on labor use some government documents. Otherwise, the author depends on scores of scholarly articles and monographs, plus numerous old-fashioned multivolume urban biographies. Combined with the author's clear writing style and keen insight on how cities actually work, the result is an attractive synthesis that will find its way onto many syllabi. All levels. R. Jensen; University of Illinois at Chicago

History professor Teaford examines the development and decline of the urban industrial Midwest. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A prequel to Teaford's earlier book on American cities since 1940, The Rough Road to Renaissance ( LJ 11/15/90), this work examines the growth of industrial cities of the Midwest in the middle and late 19th century and their decline during the first half of the 20th century. Although Teaford concentrates on major urban centers such as Cincinnati, St. Louis, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, and Milwaukee, he also considers smaller cities in the so-called Rust Belt that played important roles in the American industrial economy. The most impressive aspect of the book is Teaford's assertion that cities provided both the region and the nation with more than just economic leadership; they gave the country and the world some of its great cultural accomplishments. Some important urban centers are left out, and Teaford gives scant attention to suburbanization. Occasionally encyclopedic, the book is, however, understandably written. Recommended for all who want to learn about the origins of the contemporary urban crisis.-- Charles K. Piehl, Mankato State Univ., Minn. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.