| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Lawrence J. Vale. From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2000. Pp. xiii, 460. $45.00.

The history of public housing, like public housing itself, has long been a matter of marginal interest for both scholars and laypersons. What we commonly think of as public housing—the large, federally subsidized "projects" in big cities—has received little if any notice in textbooks and only passing attention in histories of the New Deal or the Great Society. Publicly supported housing before the New Deal has been almost entirely a subject for housing specialists. Lawrence J. Vale's sophisticated, ambitious, and engaging study of public housing in Boston makes it clear that this neglect is deeply entangled with "a long American tradition of sociospatial disdain" for poor citizens and a complex and dynamic ambivalence about how public authorities should deal with them. Avowing an intent to emphasize "public" more than "housing," this study places the history of the projects in the same rich vein of scholarship that has yielded valuable perspectives on welfare and other forms of social insurance, as "one public institution among many that grew in tandem with the modern nation-state." . . .

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