Anderson's book on nationalism, forged a new field of study when it first appeared in 1983. Since then it has sold over a quarter of a million copies and is widely considered the most important book on the subject. In this revised edition, Anderson updates and elaborates on the core question- what makes people live, die and kill in the name of nations?

Laura R. Barraclough combines ambitious historical sweep with an on-the-ground investigation of contemporary life in this iconic western suburb. She is particularly intrigued by the Valley's many rural elements, such as dirt roads, tack-and-feed stores, horse-keeping districts, citrus groves, and movie ranches. Far from natural or undeveloped spaces, these rural characteristics are, she shows, the result of deliberate urban planning decisions that have shaped the Valley over the course of more than a hundred years. The Valley's entwined history of urban development and rural preservation has real ramifications today for patterns of racial and class inequality and especially for the evolving meaning of whiteness. The Valley's urban cowboys enjoy exclusive, semi-rural landscapes alongside the opportunities afforded by one of the world's largest cities.

Tracing the birth of Denver and its sister cities Colorado Springs and Pueblo, Uniting Mountain and Plain recounts an important chapter in the transformation of the United States from a nation of traditional agricultural communities to a modern, urban, industrial society. Market values influenced the region, but farmers, miners, state officials, and others created regulatory schemes and other quasi-legal systems to advance the interests of local communities vis-á-vis larger corporate interests. By linking widely separated ecosystems in the urban-based economy of the Front Range, Brosnan notes, entrepreneurs created irrevocable environmental change and restructured the relations of the region's inhabitants with the land and with each other. Hispanic and Native American people who had lived in Colorado since long before the gold rush found themselves marginalized or displaced.

"Founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk assess sprawl's costs to society, be they ecological, economic, aesthetic, or social. This book is a lively critical lament, and an entertaining lesson on the distinctions between postwar suburbia - characterized by housing clusters, strip shopping centers, office parks, and parking lots - and the traditional neighborhoods that were built as a matter of course until mid-century. It indicts the design and development industries for the fact that America no longer builds towns. Most important, though, it is a book that also offers us solutions."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Downtown America was once the vibrant urban center romanticized in the Petula Clark song a place where the lights were brighter, where people went to spend their money and forget their worries. But in the second half of the twentieth century, "downtown" became a shadow of its former self, succumbing to economic competition and commercial decline. And the death of Main Streets across the country came to be seen as sadly inexorable, like the passing of an aged loved one. "Downtown America" cuts beneath the archetypal story of downtown's rise and fall and offers a dynamic new story of urban development in the United States. Moving beyond conventional narratives, Alison Isenberg shows that downtown's trajectory was not dictated by inevitable free market forces or natural life-and-death cycles. Instead, it was the product of human actors the contested creation of retailers, developers, government leaders, architects, and planners, as well as political activists, consumers, civic clubs, real estate appraisers, even postcard artists. Throughout the twentieth century, conflicts over downtown's mundane conditions what it should look like and who should walk its streets pointed to fundamental disagreements over American values. Isenberg reveals how the innovative efforts of these participants infused Main Street with its resonant symbolism, while still accounting for pervasive uncertainty and fears of decline. Downtown America its empty stores, revitalized marketplaces, and romanticized past will never look quite the same again.