Tom Hulme's impeccably researched debut monograph offers a fresh perspective on local citizenship through an important comparative account of Manchester and Chicago in the early twentieth century. Both cities have been characterized in historical scholarship through their image as ‘shock cities’ of industrialization and subsequently often associated with urban problems, such as poverty, poor housing and social tensions. Hulme challenges these clichés through a careful consideration of how ‘civics’ – local forms of citizenship – were communicated in different ways and how the city became a way to engage a range of citizens in the specific context of the post-1918 period. By focusing on education, civic celebrations, historical pageants and youth movements, the book demonstrates how, in both cities, urban citizenship ‘depended on a degree of democratization of both identity and practice’ (p. 200). One of the book's strengths is the comparison of Manchester and Chicago and the sheer wealth of sources, particularly using council publications, educational textbooks and contemporary reports from voluntary organizations. Historians of modern Britain and the US have much to learn from this approach and by drawing attention towards the similarities between the ways in which local governments in Manchester and Chicago approached civics, explained by Hulme as a product of their shared experiences of urbanization and the transnational communication about its problems, is an important reminder that these global cities deserve transnational approaches from historians.

Hulme is careful not to overlook the differences between Manchester and Chicago, however. Chicago, a far more corrupt city blighted by significant racial tensions, focused especially on using civics to engage newcomers and minorities to train them as citizens. However, Hulme stresses the incompleteness and challenges of this process. For example, the 1921 Chicago Pageant of Progress featured different sectors of Chicago society each day, including the city's Italian and Polish communities. Yet the representation of the Chinese community made no reference to their status as second-class citizens and the day was marred by violence by white teenagers who attacked a Chinese youth. Similarly, although Chicago had a black population of over 100,000, they were not given a celebration day and this marginalization reflected the wider discrimination and hostility experienced by the community when they tried to claim citizenship. In contrast, Manchester's wider urban culture encouraged the participation of its migrant population as it had a longer-term history of diverse processional culture.

Hulme also notes how class and gender shaped urban citizenship. He suggests that the involvement of the working classes in both cities reflected a strategy of ‘social steering’, which reflected ‘a relationship more of bargaining than of control’ (p. 85). This kind of understanding of local politics is important and should encourage historians of both cities to consider how broader processes of democratization and the widening of suffrage were experienced and responded to on a local level. Hulme also shows that for women in Manchester citizenship remained linked to their roles as wives and mothers. I did think this idea could be explored further, however, and the role of women in local politics is certainly long overdue for explicit historical investigation. Of particular note is the chapter on children and youth groups. It not only reveals the importance placed on childhood as a way to learn about citizenship but draws attention to the co-existence between local government and voluntary organizations, which offers an important perspective on how the local state governed in the early twentieth century and the importance of local agencies and charities in this period.

My only criticism is that the book engages with some rich and vivid photographs that point to the important ways in which the local governments of Manchester and Chicago relied on particular urban images to communicate ideas about local citizenship. I thought they would have benefited from a more direct and thorough study, which would have added to the richness of Hulme's analysis. Nevertheless, this is an important book that adds much to current scholarship on urban governance, local politics and childhood. Urban historians and scholars of modern Britain and the US will be influenced by this insightful comparative approach and Hulme should be congratulated for the thorough archival research undertaken here and his successful analysis of sources from the local councils that governed both cities. After the Shock City is a must read for all historians interested in urban history, local politics and urban governance in Britain and the US, particularly to show the important connections and transnational communications that shaped urban culture and citizenship more broadly in the early twentieth century.