| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Making Sense of the City: Local Government, Civic Culture, and Community Life in Urban America. Ed. by Robert B. Fairbanks and Patricia Mooney-Melvin. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001. xii, 192 pp. $50.00, ISBN 0-8142-0881-9.)

Making Sense of the City can be described in two ways as a work of urban intellectual history. First, this collection of essays by former graduate students of Zane L. Miller is a demonstration of the intellectual influence of their mentor, who retired in 1999 after a distinguished career at the University of Cincinnati. The book shows that Miller's thinking has guided the work of an accomplished group of urban scholars. Second, the essays tend to approach American urban history as a history of ideas. Following in Miller's footsteps, the contributors suggest that beliefs about the city should be seen as more than mere responses to social or economic forces and as more than particularistic expressions of gender, class, or racial identity. "The authors subscribe to the argument that at different times shared assumptions about what the city is or could be exist, and that these assumptions provide the basis for the debate about city needs and actions," write the editors, Robert B. Fairbanks and Patricia Mooney-Melvin. "Like Miller, the authors believe that the perception of the city and the broad civic culture it provokes, or fails to provoke, represents an important key to understanding the public and private responses to the city" (pp. 4–5).

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