| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Robert O. Self. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. (Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America.) Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2004. Pp. xvi, 386. $35.00.
A mere nine years after Thomas Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996) kicked off the genre, the literature of the postwar community and politics is in full flower. Robert O. Self's examination of postwar central and suburban Oakland, California, will be considered by many to be the best of the bunch.	1
There is little inherently innovative here. Self joins the ranks of historians who "complicate" facile narratives; his are black empowerment and disillusionment and "white flight" and urban decline. Self's protagonists are African American, mostly radical, wielders of political power, already well covered by a cadre of sympathetic historians. As have his predecessors, Self discovers that things like the unraveling of the liberal coalition, white backlash, and deindustrialization appeared earlier than national narratives indicate. In his attention to the spatial dimension of economic structure, Self takes after Kenneth T. Jackson, Sugrue, and contemporary geographers. What are remarkable, and will make this book a "must read" for students of postwar urban politics, are the discipline, focus, and historical craftsmanship that enable Self to employ all of these frames of reference while telling a seamless and persuasive story.	. . .

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