You are currently viewing an introduction to one of our many articles hosted on SAGE Reference Online. If you would like to view this article in full, please check with your local library for availability of the complete print or online version. For more information about our online encyclopedias, please visit www.sage-ereference.com

We are an urban nation and have been so, officially at least, since the early 20th century. But long before then, our cities played crucial roles in the economic and political development of the nation, as magnets for immigrants and as centers of culture and innovation. They still do. Yet, the discipline that we call “urban history” is really a phenomenon of post–World War II scholarship. And it was not until the 1970s that a body of research emerged to justify a journal—the Journal of Urban History —as a showcase for that scholarship. Now, after a generation of pathbreaking scholarship that has reoriented and enlightened our perception of the American city, an interdisciplinary group of scholars offers both a summary and a prospectus of the field in this Encyclopedia of American Urban History. Ours is an interdisciplinary field. Architects, planners, sociologists, environmentalists, political scientists, and economists, among others, are better ...