Editor:
Barbara M. Kelly is Curator of the Long Island Studies Institute and Director of the Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts in the Hofstra University Libraries. She is the editor of the companion volume, Long Island: The Suburban Experience (1990), and author of Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown (1993).

Publication and Ordering Information:
Suburbia Re-examined, edited by Barbara M. Kelly, was prepared under the auspices of Hofstra University and published in 1989 by Greenwood Press. It is in their Contributions in Sociology series, No. 78. The 240-page conference volume is indexed and is $59.95 in a hardcover edition (ISBN 0-313-26701-4; LC 88-29616). Mail orders will be filled by Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881; (203) 226-3571.
Of related interest: Long Island: The Suburban Experience (the companion volume from the conference); Contested Terrain: Power, Politics and Participation in Suburbia; and Nassau County: From Rural Hinterland to Suburban Metropolis.

Contents:
Foreword, by Kenneth T. Jackson
Preface, by Barbara M. Kelly
1. Introduction: When Suburbs Are the City, by Sam Bass Warner, Jr.
2. Apartness and Togetherness in Louis Wirth's "Urbanism as a Way of Life," by Harvey M. Choldin
3. Suburbia: An International Perspective, by Donald N. Rothblatt and Daniel J. Garr
4. The Future of Suburbia, by Bruce M. Stave
5. The Transformation of Bedroom Suburbia into the Outer City: An Overview of Metropolitan Structural Change since 1947, by Peter O. Muller
6. The Evolution of Suburban Downtowns in Midwestern Metropolises, by Thomas J. Baerwald
7. A More Urban Fabric for Emerging Urban Villages, by Robert T. Meeker
8. Can a Rapid Rail Transit System Limit Suburban Sprawl? Impacts on Employment Location of the Washington, D. C., Area Metrorail System, by Rodney D. Green and David M. James
9. A New American Home, by Harvey Sherman
10. The Family in Suburbia: From Tradition to Pluralism, by Hugh A. Wilson
11. Transitional Spaces: Design Considerations for a New Generation of Housing, by Michael Fifield
12. Brookline Rejects Annexation, 1873, by Ronald Dale Karr
13. Corrupt and Contented? Philadelphia's Stereotypes and Suburban Growth on the Main Line, by Michael P. McCarthy
14. Creating the Packaged Suburb: The Evolution of Planning and Business Practices in the Early Canadian Land Development Industry, 1900-1914, by Ross Paterson
15. Regional Patterns of Suburban Development, by Robert Johnston
16. Integrating a Diversified Suburb, by Marcia K. Steinberg
17. The Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning, by Marc A. Weiss
18. Defense and Deconcentration: Defense Industrialization during World War II and the Development of Contemporary American Suburbs, by Arnold R. Silverman
19. Lending in Suburban Housing Markets, by Jeffrey A. Buser and Darrell F. Parker
20. Producing Affordable Housing: Market-Process and Market-Structure Perspectives, by Marc L. Silver
21. The Federal Role in the Suburban Boom, by Brian J. O'Connell
22. Public Policy and Suburban Development, by Sylvia F. Fava
23. Real Estate Developers: Creators of Improved Subdivisions, Mentors of Suburban Government, by Ann Durkin Keating
24. The Elusive Soul of the Suburbs: An Inquiry into Contemporary Political Culture, by Philip Y. Nicholson
25. Voices Crying in the Suburbs, by Marilyn R. Chandler
26. Rethinking the Suburbs, by Robert C. Wood

Excerpts from Reviews:
"Gathered together in Suburbia Re-examined are those papers broadly reflective of the national suburban experience. (Those that focused specifically on Long Island were separately collected in another volume.) Prominent scholars of the suburban experience appear here, among them Sam Bass Warner, who, we might say, inaugurated suburban history in the United States, and whose work, while often praised here, has not been often enough emulated; Kenneth T. Jackson, whose prizewinning history of the suburban United States contributed, among other things, to our understanding of the role of the federal government in creating the contemporary suburb; Peter O. Muller, the influential geographer whose work has demonstrated the ways in which that contemporary suburb has been fundamentally transformed into urban space; and Robert Wood, author of one of the classic early studies of postwar suburbs, Suburbia (1959).
"Architects, planners, political scientists, historians, and other social scientists are represented in this volume of essays. . . . Historical interpretations of political corruption are juxtaposed with essays on the 'soul' of suburban life and the policy implications of the grip of the private real estate market. Taken together, the essays provide a useful overview of the variety of themes and methodological approaches in suburban scholarship. Most of them are quite brief, although several of the authors explore issues that they have treated at greater length elsewhere.
"Suburbia Re-examined possesses the strengths and weaknesses inherent in its conception and execution as the record of conference proceedings. On the one hand, it gathers together the work of the individual authors, many of whom have interesting and important things to say about the nature of the suburban experience. On the other hand, as a book, it lacks a fundamental set of commonalities. The editor noted in her preface that she made a conscious decision to allow the works to stand alone and not to attempt, as she put it, 'to impose an alternative structure on the organization of the book.'" --Margaret Marsh, Stockton State College, Journal of American History, 77 (March 1991): 1,413-14.

This volume has its "origins in papers presented to a Long Island Studies Conference sponsored by the Long Island Studies Institute at Hofstra University in June 1987. The first volume [Long Island: the Suburban Experience]--appearing in the Long Island Studies Series by Heart of the Lakes Publishing--contains seven of the papers which deal exclusively with Long Island topics, while the second--published as 'Contributions in Sociology No. 78' by Greenwood --offers twenty-six papers re-examining 'suburbia' in general. . . . Footnotes to the papers in Suburbia Re-examined are a valuable guide to recent secondary literature as well as to the sources used by authors in their particular investigations. The references indicate that this collection is by no means the first recent 're-examination of suburbia' by sociologists, at least, and one suspects that more re-examinations of such varied and protean phenomena will appear as 'the non-place urban realm' further unfolds. History may have ended elsewhere, but not in 'the suburbs.'
"The larger of the two volumes contains twenty-six papers treating the triumphs, tribulations, and changing attributes of suburbia and its residents as these sometime 'bedroom communities' of nearby cities have evolved into outer cities of more or less urbanized regions. Sam Warner's keynote address put it very succinctly: 'when suburbs are the city.' Changes in transport and communication, and their effects upon city and suburb, workplace and home, are explored by specialists; perhaps the book's most distinctive contribution, besides 'up-dating' sociological findings, is the section on suburban real estate development and finance. . . .
"The Long Island Studies Institute of Hofstra University is to be commended for organizing and hosting a conference which produced two valuable publications. Suburbia Re examined furnishes some essential reading for students of recent urban change." --Eric E. Lampard, SUNY at Stony Brook, Long Island Historical Journal, 3 (Fall 1990): 136-37.

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