Philip J. Ethington challenges the assumptions of several decades of urban history that treat American urban politics as the expression of social-group community experience. Instead, he maintains in The Public City, social-group identities of race, class, ethnicity, and gender were politically constructed in the public sphere in the process of political mobilization and journalistic discourse.

Philip J. Ethington is Associate Professor of History at the University of Southern California.

"An impressive book. The arguments are closely bound to the narrative, the research is monumental, the theoretical stance fertile."—Amy Bridges, American Political Science Review

"Ethington demonstrates that emerging electoral strategies and marketing practices promoted civic identities that undermined formalist Victorian notions of the universal citizen. The resulting urban history brilliantly illuminates the prehistory of the postmodern city."—Thomas Bender, Lingua Franca

"The author's forcefully presented arguments and his provocative conclusions will stimulate discussion and debate. The Public City is required reading for every historian interested in urban history."—William Issel, Pacific Historical Review