Model Town

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Haymarket bombing of 1886, and the making and unmaking of the model town of Pullman—these remarkable events in what many considered the quintessential American city forced people across the country to confront the disorder that seemed inevitably to accompany urban growth and social change. In Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief, Carl Smith explores the imaginative dimensions of these events as he traces the evolution of interconnected beliefs and actions that increasingly linked city, disorder, and social reality in the minds of Americans. Examining a remarkable range of writings and illustrations, as well as protests, public gatherings, trials, hearings, and urban reform and construction efforts, Smith argues that these three events—and the public awareness of them—not only informed one another, but collectively shaped how Americans understood, and continue to understand, Chicago and modern urban life. This classic of urban cultural history is updated with a foreword by the author that expands our understanding of urban disorder to encompass such recent examples as Hurricane Katrina, the Oklahoma City Bombing, and 9/11. “Cultural history at its finest. By utilizing questions and methodologies of urban studies, social history, and literary history, Smith creates a sophisticated account of changing visions of urban America.”—Robin F. Bachin, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

A beautifuly illustrated celebration of one of Europe’s finest neoclassical neighbourhoods: a triumph of town planning and the heart of a vibrant, thriving capital city.

Today’s visitor to Mariemont, Ohio, encounters what appears to be a community from another place and time, perhaps a country village in England’s Cotswold region. Tree-lined streets pass through neighborhoods lined with Tudor- and Georgian-style buildings. A stone church with a roof that dates from 1300 abuts an early settlement graveyard. This remarkable village is the masterpiece of the eminent town planner John Nolen (1869–1937) and the vision of philanthropist Mary M. Emery (1844–1927). Located near Cincinnati, Mariemont was designed as a self-sufficient town, its inspiration derived from the English Garden City and concepts developed in the early twentieth century. In 2007, Mariemont earned National Historic Landmark status from the Secretary of the United States Department of the Interior. Today, it serves as a “National Exemplar” for twenty-first-century developers, including those of the New Urbanist movement. Mariemont: A Pictorial History of a Model Town presents both archival photographs that trace the creation, construction, and growth of the town and contemporary views by noted Cincinnati photographer Robert Flischel. Photographs from the rich collection of the Mariemont Preservation Foundation, including rare images made of the area in the 1870s–80s and by John Nolen and Nancy Ford Cones in the 1920s, mark this important experiment in architecture and urban design.

Includes such activities as connecting-the-dots, making holiday decorations and cards, coloring, and making paper models.

In Projectland, anthropologist Holly High combines an engaging first-person narrative of her fieldwork with a political ethnography of Laos, more than forty years after the establishment of the Lao PDR and more than seven decades since socialist ideologues first “liberated” parts of upland country. In a remote village of Kandon, High finds that although socialism has declined significantly as an economic model, it is ascendant and thriving in the culture of politics and the politics of culture. Kandon is remarkable by any account. The villagers are ethnic Kantu (Katu), an ethnicity associated by early ethnographers above all with human sacrifice. They had repelled French control, and as the war went on, the revolutionary forces of Sekong were headquartered in Kandon territories. In 1996, Kandon village moved and resettled in a plateau area. “New Kandon” has become Sekong Province’s first certified “Culture Village,” the nation’s very first “Open Defecation Free and Model Health Village,” and the president of Laos personally granted the village a Labor Flag and Medal. High provides a unique and timely assessment of the Lao Party-state’s resettlement politics, and she recounts with skillful nuance the stories that are often cast into shadows by the usual focus on New Kandon as a success. Her book follows the lives of a small group of villagers who returned to the old village in the mountains, effectively defying policy but, in their words, obeying the presence that animates the land there. Revealing her sensibility with tremendous composure, High tells the experiences of women who, bound by steep bride-prices to often violent marriages, have tasted little of the socialist project of equality, unity, and independence. These women spoke to the author of “necessities” as a limit to their own lives. In a context where the state has defined the legitimate forms of success and agency, “necessity” emerged as a means of framing one’s life as nonconforming but also nonagentive.

Recreate the stirring days of the Old West with this authentically detailed replica of a 19th-century western town. The architectural details (false fronts, overhanging balconies, wooden ornamentation, etc.) are all charactersistic of western wood-frame buildings circa 1860-1880. A few of the models are in fact accurate copies of specific documented structures.

This title provides a comprehensive account of how young children learn with maps and how teachers can best teach them. A particular feature of the book is the integration of digital and conventional mapping.

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.