Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960

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University of Chicago Press, May 8, 1998 - History - 362 pages
In Making the Second Ghetto, Arnold Hirsch argues that in the post-depression years Chicago was a "pioneer in developing concepts and devices" for housing segregation. Hirsch shows that the legal framework for the national urban renewal effort was forged in the heat generated by the racial struggles waged on Chicago's South Side. His chronicle of the strategies used by ethnic, political, and business interests in reaction to the great migration of southern blacks in the 1940s describes how the violent reaction of an emergent "white" population combined with public policy to segregate the city.

"In this excellent, intricate, and meticulously researched study, Hirsch exposes the social engineering of the post-war ghetto."—Roma Barnes, Journal of American Studies

"According to Arnold Hirsch, Chicago's postwar housing projects were a colossal exercise in moral deception. . . . [An] excellent study of public policy gone astray."—Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune

"An informative and provocative account of critical aspects of the process in [Chicago]. . . . A good and useful book."—Zane Miller, Reviews in American History

"A valuable and important book."—Allan Spear, Journal of American History

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About the author (1998)

Arnold Richard Hirsch was born on March 9, 1949. He received a bachelor's degree in 1970 and a Ph.D. in history in 1978 from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His best-known book, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960, was published in 1983. He also edited two collections, one on creole New Orleans and the other on urban policy in 20th-century America. He began teaching history at the University of New Orleans in 1970 and was an emeritus professor there at the time of his death. He died from complications of Parkinson's disease and Lewy body disease on March 19, 2018 at the age of 69.