The Suburban Frontier

Crabgrass Frontier

This first full-scale history of the development of the American suburb examines how "the good life" in America came to be equated with the a home of one's own surrounded by a grassy yard and located far from the urban workplace. Integrating social history with economic and architectural analysis, and taking into account such factors as the availability of cheap land, inexpensive building methods, and rapid transportation, Kenneth Jackson chronicles the phenomenal growth of the American suburb from the middle of the 19th century to the present day. He treats communities in every section of the U.S. and compares American residential patterns with those of Japan and Europe. In conclusion, Jackson offers a controversial prediction: that the future of residential deconcentration will be very different from its past in both the U.S. and Europe.

The Suburban Frontier

Writing Women and Space

Drawing lessons from the complex and often contradictory position of white women writing in the colonial period, This unique book explores how feminism and poststructuralism can bring new types of understanding to the production of geographical knowledge. Through a series of colonial and postcolonial case studies, essays address the ways in which white women have written and mapped different geographies, in both the late nineteenth century and today, illustrating the diverse objects (landscapes, spaces, views), the variety of media (letters, travel writing, paintings, sculpture, cartographic maps, political discourse), and the different understandings and representations of people and place.