Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea

In this sweeping and original account, Mitchell Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the sixteenth century and its revival by the Nazis to the present. As Duneier shows, we cannot comprehend the entanglements of race, poverty, and place in America today without recalling the ghettos of Europe, as well as earlier efforts to understand the problems of the American city. Ghetto is the story of the scholars and activists who tried to achieve that understanding. Using new and forgotten sources, Duneier introduces us to the pioneering sociologists Horace Cayton, St. Clair Drake, and William Julius Wilson; the psychologist Kenneth Clark; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his controversial report on the black family; and the education reformer Geoffrey Canada. Duneier offers a clear-eyed assessment of these and other thinkers and doers who have shaped American ideas about the ghetto. The result is a valuable new estimation of an age-old concept.