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    The Public and Its Possibilities: Triumphs and Tragedies in the American City
    The Public and Its Possibilities: Triumphs and Tragedies in the American City
    The Public and Its Possibilities: Triumphs and Tragedies in the American City
    Ebook343 pages10 hours

    The Public and Its Possibilities: Triumphs and Tragedies in the American City

    By John D. Fairfield

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    About this ebook

    In his compelling reinterpretation of American history, The Public and Its Possibilities, John Fairfieldargues that our unrealized civic aspirations provide the essential counterpoint to an excessive focus on private interests. Inspired by the revolutionary generation, nineteenth-century Americans struggled to build an economy and a culture to complement their republican institutions. But over the course of the twentieth century, a corporate economy and consumer culture undercut civic values, conflating consumer and citizen.

    Fairfield places the city at the center of American experience, describing how a resilient demand for an urban participatory democracy has bumped up against the fog of war, the allure of the marketplace, and persistent prejudices of race, class, and gender.  In chronicling and synthesizing centuries of U.S. history—including the struggles of the antislavery, labor, women’s rights movements—Fairfield explores the ebb and flow of civic participation, activism, and democracy. He revisits what the public has done for civic activism, and the possibility of taking a greater role.

    In this age where there has been a move towards greater participation in America's public life from its citizens, Fairfield’s book—written in an accessible, jargon-free style and addressed to general readers—is especially topical.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTemple University Press
    Release dateMar 26, 2010
    ISBN9781439902127
    The Public and Its Possibilities: Triumphs and Tragedies in the American City

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    • 3/5
      Fairfield's book attempts to synthesize an enormous body of literature on American politics, civic culture, economic history, and urbanism from the founding period through the twentieth century. It provides a valuable overview of the many strands of American urban history in a relatively concise but often detailed narrative. There are two major problems from my perspective. First, the city itself is often overshadowed by larger national political and economic developments. The idea of the public's relation to urbanism and the city is never satisfactorily defined, and the fact that the setting of the city sometimes drops out of the narrative altogether makes the book less consistent and cohesive than it promises to be. If the subtitle were dropped the book's subject matter would be more accurately represented. Second, while the selection of many historical examples from New York City lends some continuity to the narrative, the overall argument suffers since the book seems to be about a handful of select cities--New York well ahead of all others--rather than about American cities in general. There is no sustained argument here about the relationship of the public realm and the American city. One must read between the lines to extract something approaching that kind of argument.In the end, the broad range of topics included in this survey of civic history as well as the scope of the author's understanding of what is part of the public realm--from democratic citizenship to labor politics to urban design--are laudable dimensions of the book. It provides a good model for further studies along the lines it sets out despite the fact that it lacks a compelling understanding of publicity and urbanity.

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