Urban History Association, 2011 Kenneth Jackson Award for Best Book (North American)

Jerome I. Hodos, Second Cities: Globalization and Local Politics in Manchester and Philadelphia (Temple University Press, 2011).

With meticulous attention to a long view of historical process and a sociological eye for theoretical frameworks that illuminate complex social phenomenon,Second Cities: Globalization and Local Politics in Manchester and Philadelphia, by  Jerome I. Hodos, has offered an exciting and insightful analysis of the central role cities and urban spaces have played, and continue to play, in the complicated drama called “globalization.” Hodos removes the contemporary buzz from the word, globalization, and he demonstrates how old, and how central to modern human existence, is humanity’s connectedness though, and awareness of, the world as a single place. Even as humans are able to transport themselves, digital information, money and financing systems, and material goods, at remarkably fast rates, and from decentralized spaces, Hodos shows, in a subtle analysis and with wonderfully straightforward prose, that cities continue to matter. In fact, Hodos skillfully proves that “globalization is a profoundly urban process.” Probably the most wonderful contribution of this book is the way it forces readers to examine the history and social impact of globalization in places outside the usual suspect cities of New York, London, and Tokyo, or cities such as Shganghi, Mumbai, Dubai and Singapore that, in the past decade or so, have increasingly become economic weathervanes by which to note the emerging directions of the global economy. Instead, Hodos skillfully proves the importance of “second cities,” places like Philadelphia and Manchester, where people actively seek to “hold down the global,” to capture some of the worldwide flows of capital, people, ideas, culture and networks, for themselves. By looking at urban places further down the list of impactful global cities, Hodos reminds readers that globalization is indeed a dynamic process, and that all the time people are jockeying for new positions within an expanding global system of trade, travel, and technology. “Globalization is about the establishment of new connections as much as it is about the disruption of old ones,” Hodos argues. He adeptly proves that some of the best places in which to witness this process are “second cities,” places that do not necessarily experience or participate in globalization the same way as larger, trendier, or more economically robust cities, but nonetheless reveal important lessons about the trajectory of globalization, and the centrality of cities and urbanity to this process.

Urban History Association, 2011 Best Article Award

Amanda I. Seligman, “ʻBut Burn—No’: The Rest of the Crowd in Three Civil Disorders in 1960s Chicago,” Journal of Urban History (March 2011).

Amanda Seligman’s article uses three examples of social disorder on Chicago’s West Side in the late 1960s to complicate how historians understand what have traditionally been called “riots.” By looking deep inside these upheavals, Seligman reveals a large cast of characters that includes not just those engaged in violent acts but many others who, despite their presence, are usually left out of historical narratives: displaced neighborhood residents, counter-rioters begging for order, relief workers, and even children trying to make their way home. She draws on European crowd literature to pull our attention away from the crowd’s motives and toward its actions instead, thereby illuminating the issues that were of particular importance to specific communities. Seligman concludes by asking that historians think more carefully about how we label these events, arguing that more neutral terms such as “disorder” and “upheaval” better reflect their complicated nature than terms like “riot,” “rebellion,” and “uprising.” The article is consistently clear and thought-provoking, making it perfect for classroom use, and its fresh approach opens up new opportunities for future scholarship on how urban disorders fit in the broader history of the civil rights movement. Although Seligman chose Chicago as her case study, her significant contribution deepens our understanding of urban disorders across the nation during this tumultuous period in American history.

Urban History Association, 2011 Best Dissertation Award

Julio Capo, Jr., “‘It’s Not Queer to Be Gay’:  Miami and the Emergence of the Gay Rights Movement, 1945 – 1995” (Florida International University, 2011)

Set in Miami, Capo’s study explores how boosters’ promotion of the city as a “wide-open” tourist destination helped to foster challenges to sexual norms. Capo’s work gives great depth to this depiction, examining portrayals of Miami’s sexual culture in the local and national media, explaining Miami’s emerging sexual geography, and detailing indecency arrests, transgender marriages, and other local denunciations of gay culture to demonstrate that Miami’s local culture both allowed challenges to Cold War sexual norms and helped to reinforce them. Capo examines, in stunning detail, how Cuban exiles entered into these debates about urban sexuality, using sexual politics as a way to claim local political power, a model that would later be followed by Haitians, Nicaraguans, Colombians, and other Latin American immigrant groups. Finally, Capo explains how a new gay politics focused on sexual rights emerged in the years after Anita Bryant’s 1977 campaign to overturn a local ordinance that extended legal protections, forged in the civil rights movement, to homosexuals. Capo’s study thus represents a major contribution to the political history of sexuality as well as urban history. Directing attention away from New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco as the key sites where gay politics was forged, it demonstrates how a particular sexual culture emerged in both the time and space of postwar Miami, how Miami’s place at the intersection of North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America, fostered and altered that sexual culture, and how local struggles over Miami’s gay culture led local actors to forge and defend demands for anti-discrimination and equal rights that became hallmarks of the larger gay rights movement in the aftermath of the Bryant campaign. In combining scholarship from a variety of historical disciplines in a highly engaging narrative, Julio Capo, Jr.’s “’It’s Not Queer to Be Gay,” is a worthy winner of the award for outstanding dissertation.