AHA Session 268
Sunday, January 10, 2027: 9:00 AM-10:30 AM
Studio 7 (New Orleans Marriott, 2nd Floor)
Chair:
Ashley M. Howard, University of Iowa
Papers:
Comment:
Ashley M. Howard, University of Iowa
Session Abstract
This formal panel brings together four papers that reconsider the “urban crisis” of the late twentieth century to examine a set of enduring struggles over governance, law, political power, and belonging. Focusing on Boston, Chicago, Durham, and East Chicago, the papers trace how communities confronted desegregation, deindustrialization, immigration, and fiscal instability—and how responses to these challenges reshaped democratic institutions and urban political life. Emiliano Aguilar’s paper examines the postindustrial political and economic tensions in East Chicago, Indiana, and policymakers’ embrace of legalized lakefront gambling in the 1990s. Aguilar argues that casinos were not merely an economic development strategy but a means of preserving a Democratic political machine amid deindustrialization. In this context, crisis opened new possibilities for reimagining both urban identity and machine governance. Elizabeth Barahona’s study centers Durham, North Carolina, where a wave of robberies targeting Latino workers in 1997 exposed systemic barriers to civil justice. Barahona highlights how African American and Latino residents forged coalitions to expand access to justice, safety, and belonging, revealing how local communities leveraged shared experiences of exclusion to build new local models of civic inclusion. Jeffrey Helgeson’s paper reexamines Boston’s school desegregation crisis through the experiences of Ruth Batson and others who were forced to “endure busing” well beyond the mid-1970s. Rather than a temporary disruption eclipsed by a “Boston Renaissance,” Helgeson shows how desegregation produced fractured historical experiences and memories and lasting tensions between federal authority, private power, and the promise of a democratic public sphere. Nick Kryczka’s contribution traces the transformation of urban education policy in Chicago from desegregation to “choice and accountability.” The paper puts the career of neoliberal reformers like Paul Vallas within a longer arc of urban progressivism. Kryczka demonstrates how stakeholders in the desegregation process created policy forums, networks, and participatory structures that would promote technocratic reforms as possible solutions to fiscal and racial crises. Together, these papers argue that late twentieth-century urban crises persisted as influences in contests over law, governance, and urban life. The authors seek to engage audiences interested in the ways that comparative urban history can help inform new ways to periodize and understand the modern U.S. city.
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