When I studied American history about 27 years ago, during the late 1980s, we gave a cursory look at the development of post war suburbia. In a packed syllabus there was little time to do the topic justice. Considering the many millions of Americans the development of suburbia affected, both positively and negatively, it should be regarded as one of the most significant developments in the study of 20th Century American social history. One glaring omission from the textbooks was the racial dimension to the development of suburbia and the fact that it was planned and developed as an exclusively white utopia. Without exploring the racism at the heart of American suburban expansion in the 1940s and 1950s, a disingenuous and misleading version of the past is the only possible outcome; when suburban developments were built there were winners and losers.

Here’s a podcast I did last week that focuses on this aspect of the American Dream

Here too is the video: