The Levittowners: Ways Of Life And Politics In A New Suburban Community
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In postwar America, millions of families packed their dreams into cardboard boxes and headed for the suburbs — and nowhere was this migration more vividly captured than in Herbert J. Gans's landmark sociological study, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community. Drawing on two years of participant observation as an actual resident of Levittown, New Jersey, Gans chronicles the birth of one of America's most iconic planned communities from the ground up, documenting the aspirations, conflicts, social hierarchies, and political battles that shaped everyday suburban life in the late 1950s and early 1960s. With the precision of an ethnographer and the eye of a journalist, he presents the real human drama beneath the manicured lawns and identical rooftops, dismantling the popular myth that suburbia was a cultural wasteland of conformity and homogeneity. Gans argues compellingly that the Levittowners were not passive victims of a cookie-cutter lifestyle but active architects of a new and distinctly American way of living, one shaped as much by class, ethnicity, and religion as by urban planning. The Levittowners stands as a foundational text in urban sociology and American cultural studies, celebrated for its meticulous research, its empathy for ordinary people, and its challenge to the intellectual condescension that so often coloured mid-century commentary on suburban life. Gans's narrative remains as sharp and relevant today as when it was first published — a revelatory portrait of a society remaking itself in real time, and a question that still haunts us: what do we truly sacrifice, and what do we gain, when we build our lives at the edge of a city?
Author: Herbert J. Gans
Format: Paperback
Genre: Society & culture
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In postwar America, millions of families packed their dreams into cardboard boxes and headed for the suburbs — and nowhere was this migration more vividly captured than in Herbert J. Gans's landmark sociological study, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community. Drawing on two years of participant observation as an actual resident of Levittown, New Jersey, Gans chronicles the birth of one of America's most iconic planned communities from the ground up, documenting the aspirations, conflicts, social hierarchies, and political battles that shaped everyday suburban life in the late 1950s and early 1960s. With the precision of an ethnographer and the eye of a journalist, he presents the real human drama beneath the manicured lawns and identical rooftops, dismantling the popular myth that suburbia was a cultural wasteland of conformity and homogeneity. Gans argues compellingly that the Levittowners were not passive victims of a cookie-cutter lifestyle but active architects of a new and distinctly American way of living, one shaped as much by class, ethnicity, and religion as by urban planning. The Levittowners stands as a foundational text in urban sociology and American cultural studies, celebrated for its meticulous research, its empathy for ordinary people, and its challenge to the intellectual condescension that so often coloured mid-century commentary on suburban life. Gans's narrative remains as sharp and relevant today as when it was first published — a revelatory portrait of a society remaking itself in real time, and a question that still haunts us: what do we truly sacrifice, and what do we gain, when we build our lives at the edge of a city?