This collection of essays, the fruits of a 2005 panel at the Social Science History Association conference, focuses on the relationship between urban government and political authority in the United States throughout the past two centuries, with particular emphasis on the generally ambivalent and frequently hostile relationship between these two factors. The contributors, nearly all of whom are social scientists rather than historians, are quick to acknowledge their intellectual debt to the paradigm-shifting work of Stephen Skowronek and Karen Orren, especially their concept of ‘intercurrence’, a concept which ‘appreciate[s] the contradictory forces and multiple strains of authority that churn between veneers of durability’ (p. 2). The result is a volume which offers certain insights to historians of urbanity, but the majority of whose essays are more theoretical than historical in their approach.

Richardson Dilworth's useful introduction effectively lays out the volume's concerns, noting that, although the United States’ nearly 20,000 municipal governments employ more people than the entire federal government, ‘the city has been a woefully neglected topic within the recent study of American politics’ (p. 1). The book's first section examines the relationship between the city and the hoary conceit of American exceptionalism: Robert Lieberman offers a whistle-stop tour of American urban development, usefully noting the extent to which the nation's political institutions continue to retain a pro-rural bias, privileging land over population size, while Jerome Hodos’ and Jason Kaufman's contributions respectively compare patterns of urban vs. national authority in the US to those found in Britain and Canada. These two essays pose thought-provoking questions to scholars of urban history, and attest to the continued usefulness of the comparative and transnational approach to the study of the urban past and present. In Part II, ‘Rethinking urban politics’, Jessica Trounstine compares the endeavours of ‘bosses’ and ‘reformers’ in urban government, and comes to the intriguing conclusion that ‘machine and reform coalitions shared many more characteristics than the conventional wisdom would suggest’ (p. 77). Specifically, both groups, once in power, did their utmost to bias local institutions to their respective advantage, by offering benefits, such as municipal jobs, to their supporters, restricting voting ability, gerrymandering electoral districts and replacing elected with appointed offices. While Trounstine's essay offers a needed corrective to oversimplified narratives of urban political vice and virtue, it would have been strengthened by more specific examples of urban experiences. Clarence Stone and Robert Whelan present a useful and well-informed overview of the study of urban politics in the post-World War II United States; their contribution is a lucid and concise introduction to this subfield, and is recommended reading to scholars of the modern American city. Part III, ‘City, space, and nation’, begins with Neil Brenner's discussion of the politics of development, which I found to be the volume's weakest essay, at least in relation to the concerns of historians: it is entirely theoretical, and frequently obscure in its jargon – for example, I struggled to understand what he meant by criticizing ‘urban fetishism’, which he claims renders ‘the built environment . . . a pregiven materiality’ (p. 121). Less obscure is Clarissa Rile Hayward's piece on the relationship between spatiality and race in the American city, although, like Trounstine's contribution, it would have benefited from a stronger empirical base. Philip Ethington and David Levitus present a broad but well-supported overview of the relationship between cities, regions and political authority from the Constitutional era to the present, although their essay overlaps extensively with that of Lieberman. The final section, on immigration, ethnicity, and race, is likely to be of the greatest interest to readers of this journal. While Alethia Jones’ analysis of the urban roots of the American post office savings bank system is very narrow in its focus, Michael Jones-Correa's study of riots in the twentieth-century American city offers a thoughtful ‘bottom up’ account of race riots, emphasizing the ways in which these events function as ‘critical junctures’ (p. 179) which catalyse institutional shifts. The volume's finest essay is that by Matthew Crenson, which offers a deeply researched and intellectually probing voyage through the history of the city of Baltimore in order to understand the city's unique patterns of racial relations from the era of slavery to the present. In so doing, Crenson convinces the reader that ‘tracing the course of local politics may add to our understanding of national political development’ (p. 220), thus ably fulfilling the aims of this volume.

As suggested above, and as is so often true of edited volumes, some of the contributions to The City in American Political Development are stronger than others, and quite a number are likely to be of limited applicability to historians of urban life. It is difficult to imagine that scholars of cities outside the US will find much of relevance here, perhaps excepting Hodos’ and Kaufman's essays. Nonetheless, those interested in the recent political development of the American city are well advised at least to look through this volume, and can learn much from it.