Review"Eric Fure-Slocum takes an in-depth look at thepolitics and public life of 1940s Milwaukee. He resurrects the history oflong-forgotten struggles over public entertainment, housing shortages, anddowntown modernization, and uses them to illustrate two very different visionsof postwar urban development: what he calls "working-class" versus"growth" politics. Related analyses should be written for many UScities, but Milwaukee is a particularly good site for such study. The city hada powerful and vibrant socialist governing tradition dating from 1910, as wellas an emerging energetic business coalition committed to reshaping what it sawas an outmoded, inefficient city. Fure-Slocum has us rethink the periodizationof twentieth-century urban history as he seamlessly takes us from the depressionera to wartime to reconversion, showing how Milwaukeeans reshaped their cityand their lives."Margo Anderson, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee"In this gracefully written, deeply researched, and cleverly illustratedbook, Eric Fure-Slocum breaks the traditional division between"wartime" and "postwar," and challenges the easy assumptionthat "growth politics" and urban renewal were necessarily benign andinevitable. What counted as modern and outmoded were code words for otherinterests often dimly understood. Underneath the daily political headlines ofbond issues and elections, Americans were defining who belonged and who didn'tdeserve respect. Fure-Slocum challenges the habits of mind that treat AfricanAmericans and women of all ethnic groups as marginal. In his vision of thecity, race and gender politics are present from the outset, linked sharply withthe politics of class, and enacted by individuals whose histories he studiesand whose alliances he analyzes."Linda K. Kerber, University of Iowa, and author of No Constitutional Rightto Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship"This is an insightful, carefully crafted, and deeply researchedstudy."Roger D. Simon, Journal of American History"In this remarkable book, Eric Fure-Slocum charts the emergence of"growth politics" in Milwaukee over the course of the 1940s ... [It] alsoilluminates a larger debate over the nature of urban life in the postwar years... The great strength of Contesting the Postwar City is thatit brings back to life a time when today's consensus had not yet solidified."Kim Phillips-Fein, Labor"Fure-Slocum's fine book is part of a growing literature on mid-centuryurbanism and the origins of the Rust Belt ...The book's greatest strength liesin its perspective ... it encourages us to rethink how the policies and practicesof public housing, racial segregation, industrial mobility, and urban sprawlemerged not from an inevitable and shared sense of urban decline."Paul O'Hara, American Historical ReviewHis is a truly formidable piece of urban history."Robert A. Beauregard, Reviews in American History"[An] important book ... Scholars of American urban life and politicsshould welcome this volume. The author makes a convincing case thatdevelopments in Milwaukee had significant parallels with changes elsewhere inpostwar urban America. The next generation of students seeking to understandthe politics of the war and early postwar years will find this book a usefulscaffolding."Joe William Trotter, Jr, Social History"In this detailed case study of a lone city during a single decade, theauthor manages to tackle a number of important issues to students of US urbanlife in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His analysis ofhow Milwaukee's political culture changed significantly considers the importantroles played by African Americans, women, trade unions, and other groupsstriving for economic security in a hazardous time ofdeindustrialization."Roger Biles, Michigan Historical ReviewProduct DescriptionFocusing on midcentury Milwaukee, Eric Fure-Slocum charts the remaking of political culture in the industrial city. Professor Fure-Slocum shows h