Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities by John J Czaplicka

Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities by John J Czaplicka

Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities tells the story of how fractured urban communities sometimes succeed and sometimes fail at creating a way of life embracing the many varieties of people and institutions that make cities both urban and urbane. The volume studies nine cities long divided by race, nationality, class, and religion: Washington, D.C., Kaliningrad, St. Petersburg, L'viv, Prague, Vienna, Berlin, Barcelona, and Riga. All have undergone greater and lesser transitions from authoritarian to democratic forms of government, creating new needs and opportunities to shape a civic identity. The contributors study these cities' presentations of their own history as embodied in everything from museum exhibits to architecture to street names. Do a city's efforts at material renewal and reform reflect and promote an inclusive, pluralistic self-image that supports nascent democratic institutions, or an exclusionary one that claims all the city for some particular group? Drawing on the experiences of the past half-century, Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities shows how the emergence of pluralistic images of the past, present, and future can open the way for more pluralistic understandings of power and social relations. Contributors are John Czaplicka, Howard Gillette, Jr., Grigorii V. Golosov, Yaroslav Hrytsak, Brian Ladd, Siegfried Mattl, James A. Miller, Jiri Musil, Cynthia Paces, Blair A. Ruble, Olga Sezneva, Ojars Sparitis, Pep Subiros, Victor Susak, Ilya Utekhin, and John Michael Vlach.

The complexity of these cases may not quite generate easily applied solutions, but the essays certainly merit attention as synthetic studies of urban place and historyChoice 2004 Well written and will appeal to readers across business and social science disciplines... Accessible and grounded in contemporary public affairs. -- James G. Mellon Political Studies Review 2005 It is rare for a volume comprising such a diverse range of articles to be as successful and as coherent as this book. It is also a timely call for scholarly engagement with some of the most urgent political, social and moral problems facing contemporary urban communities. Slavonic and East European Review 2005 Open[s] a floodgate for further investigation. -- Stephanie Ryberg Journal of Urban History 2008

John J. Czaplicka is an art and cultural historian currently affiliated with Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. Blair A. Ruble is director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the author, most recently, of Second Metropolis: Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Osaka. Lauren Crabtree, until recently fiscal assistant at the Kennan Institute, is a graduate student in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780801873850
ISBN 10	0801873851
Title	Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities
Author	John J Czaplicka
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Johns Hopkins University Press
Year published	2003-08-22
Number of pages	448
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.