The Southern Side of Chicago: Arnold R. Hirsch and the Renewal of Southern Urban History

Abstract

This essay maintains that Arnold R. Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago must be viewed as critical to the evolution of Southern history. The author shows how Hirsch’s handling of white anxiety, racial terrorism, and state actions in the preservation of racial segregation helped move Southern historians to adopt a comparative and structural approach to racial politics and metropolitan life. It also encouraged them to abandon interpretive frameworks that treated the South as exceptional, thus proving critical to the development of “Sunbelt” urban history. The fact of Hirsch’s own residing in the South and his collaborations with Southern historians during the publication of Making the Second Ghetto offers additional context to explain the book’s resonance in Southern historiography.

Introduction: Urban History, Arnold Hirsch, and the Second Ghetto Thesis Redux

“…Hirsch, "as a student of spatialized power," in Connolly's words, forced American historians to acknowledge that white supremacy knew no regional boundaries. 23 Lilia Fernández offers a personal account of the impact of Hirsch on her scholarly trajectory. Fernández grew up in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood, for a time lived in a basement apartment similar to the "rabbit dens" Hirsch described, passed the Robert Taylor Homes on her way to her public magnet school, and witnessed the racial succession of neighborhoods like Back of the Yards in the 1980s.…”