Reviews for Introduction to the History of Sociology - Harry Elmer Barnes - Library Binding

The average rating for Introduction to the History of Sociology - Harry Elmer Barnes - Library Binding based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-03-19 00:00:00 Ana Castillo The late Maggie Garb was probably a better writer than I deserved editing a newspaper real estate section, but I indulged her interest in the evolution of Chicago neighborhoods. Garb left freelance writing for academia, breaking ground with this history of homeownership after the Chicago fire. Real estate then was prone to speculation and by no means an assured path to wealth. But immigrant families saw it as a security they could borrow against, carpenters found a good living as small-time builders, and developers learned how efficiency and marketing could scale their business. As the city grew, government set winners and losers early on by where they extended sewer lines, health reformers saw the move from tenements to tracts as unalloyed public good, and patterns of segregation began to set in place. With wealth inequality growing wider, it's fascinating to see how the gap opened up, and the progress of home ownership toward its hallowed position.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-06-13 00:00:00 Amy Whims An ambitious account of patterns in home ownership and the use of homes over fifty-odd years in Chicago, City of Dreams places particular importance on the symbolic “imagined landscape” (136) of Chicago, particularly the single-family home with its fringe of green. It attempts to explain not just the material consequences of this landscape, but also how the single-family owned home came to represent autonomy, class stability, and gendered authority. As such, City of Dreams draws a differently contoured map of modernity than that of Harvey’s Paris. Where Harvey emphasizes the grand public symbols of imperial Paris – the boulevards and the market – Garb focuses on the more enclosed space of the single-family home and its sewage hookup. Infrastructure and its discontents are key themes of modernity, elucidated through Garb’s apt use of the beginnings of modern mass media: real estate journals, advertisements, pamphlets and other promulgators of a laboriously acquired dream home.