Between 1950 and 2000, the number of Americans living in suburbs rose from 23 percent to 50 percent of the total population, and, in a demographic sense, at the beginning of the twenty-first century the United States could truly be considered a suburbanized nation.1 The recent passing of such a milestone obscures a much longer American preoccupation, even obsession, with communities that are neither urban nor rural. The roots of this phenomenon extend back into the nineteenth century, and even automobile-oriented patterns of suburban development have now existed for well over a century. These antecedents fostered a cultural bias that increasingly linked suburban locales with the “good life,” yet the full flourishing of a dominant, middle-class lifestyle wholly linked not just to the suburbs but, more to the point, to the new houses constructed in these suburbs did not occur until the decades following World War II. This postwar...
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September 2017
Book Review|
September 01 2017
Review: Houses for a New World: Builders and Buyers in American Suburbs, 1945–1965, by Barbara Miller Lane
Barbara Miller Lane
Houses for a New World: Builders and Buyers in American Suburbs, 1945–1965
Princeton, N.J.
: Princeton University Press
, 2015
, 320 pp., 224 b/w illus. $49.95, ISBN 9780691167619
James A. Jacobs
James A. Jacobs
Independent scholar
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Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2017) 76 (3): 398–400.
Citation
James A. Jacobs; Review: Houses for a New World: Builders and Buyers in American Suburbs, 1945–1965, by Barbara Miller Lane. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 September 2017; 76 (3): 398–400. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2017.76.3.398
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