Product Description: In low-income U.S. cities, street fights between teenage girls are common. These fights take place at school, on street corners, or in parks, when one girl provokes another to the point that she must either “step up” or be labeled a “punk...read more

Examines the damaging divisions that isolate poor city minority residents from the middle-class suburban majority. This title focuses on how the needs of the permanently poor have been unmet through the alternating years of promises and neglect.

Product Description: An absorbing journey into the Latino struggle to gain social power, by the acclaimed urban historian.A fascinating account of the Latinization of the US urban landscape, Magical Urbanism forcefully shows that this is a demographic and cultural revolution with extraordinary implications...read more

Product Description: Widely used in university courses on Native American history through five editions, The American Indian: Past and Present has been thoroughly revised to present an up-to-date view of Indian heritage. This timely anthology brings together pieces written over the last thirty years—most published in the past decade—that represent some of the best scholarship available...read more

An award-winning journalist and cultural commentator offers a provocative study of the influence of 'ghetto' attitudes, lifestyles, and mores on urban communities and American culture, in a thoughtful critique of a persona that is demeaning to women, devalues education, celebrates the worst African-American stereotypes, and provokes the destruction of civil peace. 25,000 first printing.

A sociology professor looks at the sociological aspect of boxing based on the three years he spent with a gym on Chicago's south side.

For the past twenty-five years, American culture has been marked by an almost palpable sense of anxiety about the nation's inner cities. Urban America has been consistently depicted as a site of moral decay and uncontrollable violence, held in stark contrast to the allegedly moral, orderly suburbs and exurbs. In Urban Nightmares, Steve Macek documents the scope of these alarmist representations of the city, examines the ideologies that informed them, and exposes the interests they ultimately served. Macek begins by exploring the conservative analysis of the urban poverty, joblessness, and crime that became entrenched during the post-Vietnam War era. Instead of attributing these conditions to broad social and economic conditions, right-wing intellectuals, pundits, policy analysts, and politicians blamed urban problems on the urban underclass itself. This strategy was successful, Macek argues, in deflecting attention from growing income disparities and in helping to secure popular support both for reactionary social policies and the assumptions underwriting them.Turning to the media, Macek explains how Hollywood filmmakers, advertisers, and journalists validated the right-wing discourse on the urban crisis, popularizing its vocabulary. Network television news and weekly news magazines, he shows, covered the inner city and its inhabitants in ways consonant with the right's alarmist discourse. At the same time, Hollywood zealously recycled this antiurban bias in films ranging from genre thrillers like Falling Down and Judgment Night to auteurist efforts like Batman and Seven. Even advertising, Macek argues, mobilized fears of a perilous urban realm to sell products from SUVs to home alarm systems.Published during the second term of an American president whose conservative agenda has been an ongoing disaster for the poor and the working class, Urban Nightmares exposes a divisive legacy of media bias against the cities and their inhabitants and issues a wake-up call to readers to recognize that media images shape what we believe about others' (and our own) place in the real world-and the consequences of those beliefs can be devastating.Steve Macek teaches media studies, urban and suburbia studies, and speech communication at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois.

Product Description: An original look at urban aging by the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize winner.In a book that Robert B. Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, called "provocative and insightful ….combining revealing details about specific people with thoughtful analysis of the trends that have shaped their lives," Katherine S...read more

Looks at the strengths and weaknesses of different antisegregation strategies in the United States and other developed countries and includes discussion of ethnic enclaves in such cities as Belfast, Toronto, Amsterdam, and New York.

Product Description: Learning to Dream With Your Eyes Open: A Survival Guide for Inner City Youth is a narrative non-fiction written to help inner city youth overcome obstacles to achieving success. The author uses practical advice and real-life scenarios to paint a vivid picture of the path to success...read more

A collection of miraculous stories based on years of research and hundreds of interviews reveals the quiet revolution in American cities that is patching together the work of hundreds of organizations to revitalize the nation's 'rust belt.' (view table of contents)

Product Description: The deterioration of the American inner city stands in stark contrast to the prosperity characteristic of the United States for much of the twentieth century. Skyscrapers that once defined the modern era stand derelict and abandoned...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

A cultural analysis by the author of No Shame in My Game considers the particular challenges of inner city seniors, identifying the historical, personal, and political factors that contribute to the problems being faced by the aged in urban America. (view table of contents)

Product Description: The Neighborhood Preservation Initiative, a comprehensive community building program in ten neighborhoods from nine mostly mid-sized cities, is examined in It Takes a Neighborhood. Wright shows what was learned through NPI about the value of focusing on working-class neighborhoods, as well as how to think about and structure community building efforts generally...read more

The authors focus on what has worked in the inner cities over the past decade, touting pragmatism over dogma as the solution to many urban ills.

Product Description: A comprehensive look at inner-city youth programs. Urban Sanctuaries analyzes the strategies of community leaders and organizations. The author describes how these leaders create and sustain youth programs in spite of enormous challenges. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

A study of the decline of America's urban centers discusses the devastating environmental, cultural, social, and economic impact of suburbia on American cities and offers a visionary approach to revitalizing American society, our urban communities, and the future of America. 15,000 first printing. (view table of contents)

Examines how scholars, activists, policy makers, and displaced working people have made sense of the contemporary ghetto

Urban teens of color are often portrayed as welfare mothers, drop outs, drug addicts, and both victims and perpetrators of the many kinds of violence which can characterize life in urban areas. Although urban youth often live in contexts which include poverty, unemployment, and discrimination, they also live with the everydayness of school, friends, sex, television, music, and other elements of teenage lives. Inner City Kids explores how a group of African American, Jamaican, Puerto Rican, and Haitian adolescents make meaning of and respond to living in an inner-city community. The book focuses on areas of particular concern to the youth, such as violence, educational opportunities, and a decaying and demoralizing urban environment characterized by trash, pollution, and abandoned houses. McIntyre's work with these teens draws upon participatory action research, which seeks to codevelop programs with study participants rather than for them. (view table of contents)