Reviews in the Chicago Tribune

Two reviews of interest appeared today in the Chicago Tribune. THS past president Eric Arnesen assesses a book on Levittown and civil rights and Katrin Schultheiss reviews a volume on Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier. Both Arnesen and Schulteiss also have essays in the April issue of Historically Speaking: Schultheiss, "The Ends of the Earth and the “Heroic Age” of Polar Exploration: A Review Essay" and Arnesen, "Reconsidering the 'Long Civil Rights Movement.'" (The latter is part of a feature, Civil Rights Historiography: Two Perspectives, which also includes David Chappell's piece, "The Lost Decade of Civil Rights.")

Le Corbusier: A Life by Nicholas Fox Weber Katrin Schultheiss, Chicago Tribune, 28 March 2009

Americans may be forgiven for not being intimately familiar with the work of the Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier. Unlike his contemporaries Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, he spent little time in the United States and designed only one significant American building, the Carpenter Center at Harvard University. His other major project in the United States, a failed bid to design the new United Nations headquarters in 1947, remained a source of deep resentment until his death in 1965. Read on>>>

Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America's Legendary Suburb by David Kushner
Eric Arnesen, Chicago Tribune, 28 March 2009

More than a half-century before our current disaster in the housing market, the United States confronted a very different sort of housing crisis. During the Great Depression of the 1930s and the economic boom of World War II, few private homes had been constructed. With demobilization after World War II, vast numbers of military veterans and their families, flush with cash and GI Bill-backed mortgages, were desperate for housing. A generation was ready to move, but a severe housing shortage initially thwarted their desires. Read on>>>