Few historians would argue that our times are not characterized by a concern for community. What we have not acknowledged is that the rise of interest in community and neighborhood organization since the 1950s has coincided with a revolt against a deterministic notion of culture as a total way of life definitive of the possibilities of human behavior in particular locations or times. In the past two decades that revolt has centered on a quest for self‐fulfillment. This has led to a public policy dilemma and to a semiparalysis in politics, for in a community of liberated individuals in pursuit of self‐fulfillment there can be no public welfare toward which to work and to sacrifice and over which to argue and make compromises.
History is a tricky business, if only because history, as a phenomenon of the present, subject to scrutiny and manipulation, does not exist: it is, in a very real sense, made up. The study of the history of historical writing is a doubly tricky business because it is not merely what really happened in the past which determined the way people acted and wrote history, but also the way in which people perceived what happened. These complications require that one not only take into account what historians have said but also their perceptions of reality in their own times and the way that perception defined their conception of what was real in the past. Definition becomes the crux of the matter, for the way our predecessors wrote urban history depended upon their definition of their subject matter.
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