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Zusatztext For historians interested in the intersection of race and class in the 20th century! this work is a must read. Informationen zum Autor Bryant Simon has taught at the University of Georgia and is now Professor of History at Temple University. He is the author of A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910-1948 and co-editor of 'Jumpin Jim Crow': Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights. He grew up in southern New Jersey. Klappentext During the first half of the twentieth century, Atlantic City was the nation's most popular middle-class resort--the home of the famed Boardwalk, the Miss America Pageant, and the board game Monopoly. By the late 1960s, it had become a symbol of urban decay and blight, compared by journaliststo bombed-out Dresden and war-torn Beirut. Several decades and a dozen casinos later, Atlantic City is again one of America's most popular tourist spots, with thirty-five million visitors a year. Yet most stay for a mere six hours, and the highway has replaced the Boardwalk as the city's mostimportant thoroughfare. Today the city doesn't have a single movie theater and its one supermarket is a virtual fortress protected by metal detectors and security guards. In this wide-ranging book, Bryant Simon does far more than tell a nostalgic tale of Atlantic City's rise, near death, and reincarnation. He turns the depiction of middle-class vacationers into a revealing discussion of the boundaries of public space in urban America. In the past, he argues, thepublic was never really about democracy, but about exclusion. During Atlantic City's heyday, African Americans were kept off the Boardwalk and away from the beaches. The overly boisterous or improperly dressed were kept out of theaters and hotel lobbies by uniformed ushers and police. The creationof Atlantic City as the "Nation's Playground" was dependent on keeping undesirables out of view unless they were pushing tourists down the Boardwalk on rickshaw-like rolling chairs or shimmying in smoky nightclubs. Desegregation overturned this racial balance in the mid-1960s, making the city's public spaces more open and democratic, tooopen and democratic for many middle-class Americans, who fled to suburbs and suburban-style resorts like Disneyworld. With the opening of the first casino in 1978, theurban balance once again shifted, creating twelve separate, heavily guarded, glittering casinos worlds w Zusammenfassung Boardwalk of Dreams traces the transformations of public space in Atlantic City during the 20th century, grappling with themes of tourism, racial identity, class mobility, urban 'renewal', and the various roles of middle-class vacationers, residents, and business figures in shaping this particular landscape....
