The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900 in Bloomington, MN

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.