American Historical Association

131st Annual Meeting (January 5-8, 2017)

January 05 - 08, 2017

Racial perceptions shaped innumerable aspects of urban planning across the United States throughout the period of industrialization. However, the relationship between these ideas, planning policy, and metropolitan outcomes requires further analysis. The expansion of southern forms of de jure segregation into northern, rural communities like Asbury Park and Howell, New Jersey, bear striking similarities to aggressive forms of exclusion found in Winter Park, Florida, in the first half of the twentieth century. These legal mechanisms attempted to frustrate myriad efforts by African Americans to accumulate wealth in both housing and retail markets between 1880 and 1930 – with varying degrees of success. The information revolution and the global service economy replicate aspects of this political economy at the start of the twenty-first century.  Rural communities remain pivotal locations in the national politics of metropolitan development for all people.  Taken together, the work of Julian Chambliss, David Goldberg, and Walter Greason demonstrate the complicated nature of resort life and, by extension, the complexities of industrial life in the twentieth century United States.