| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840–1917. By Jon A. Peterson. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xxiv, 431 pp. $59.95, ISBN 0-8018-7210-3.)
With this book, Jon A. Peterson has provided a clear-eyed and judicious overview of that long historical moment during which Americans attempted to implant, in their cities, an image of the order, beauty, and efficiency so conspicuously absent from the rest of their society.	1
The Birth of City Planning in the United States is notable for treating the birth and evolution of American city planning in a manner free both of the self-congratulatory tone of earlier profession-based histories, such as Mel Scott's American City Planning since 1890 (1969), and of the subsequent critical overreaction exemplified by M. Christine Boyer's Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (1983). Between these two poles, ample room has long remained for a systematic but critical review of this ultimately flawed effort to systematize the landscape of free market republicanism. Peterson's work will fill a substantial portion of that middle ground for years to come.	. . .

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