This page is referenced by:

• 1 2013-08-15T18:41:15-07:00 Introduction 59 Delmont Introduction plain 2016-03-04T08:34:08-08:00
  President Richard Nixon made his most important statement on busing in a televised Presidential address in March 1972, shortly after Florida’s Democratic presidential primary in which the busing issue propelled George Wallace to a landslide victory and 74 percent of Floridians signalled their opposition to busing in a ballot straw poll. Nixon called on Congress to pass a moratorium on new busing orders and pass new legislation that would 'establish reasonable national standards' rather than the 'unequal treatment of among regions, states and local school districts' ordered by the courts. While the compromise bill Congress eventually passed was weaker than Nixon’s proposal, White House advisor John Erlichman later described the televised speech as a political victory: 'Whether Congress passed the busing moratorium was not as important as that the American people understood that Richard Nixon opposed busing as much as they did.' Nixon’s televised speech prompted the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Education Fund to publish It’s Not the Distance, 'It’s the Niggers', a report which fact-checked Nixon’s claims about busing. The speech also intensified tensions between the White House and the civil rights lawyers in the Justice Department who worked on school desegregation cases, seven of whom resigned in protest. In a letter published in the Washington Post, one of the lawyers wrote, 'As I sit here watching President Nixon make his statement on school busing I am sickened. Sickened because it is the job of the President to unite and lead the nation to the future, not buckle under the weight of political pressure and retreat to a dark and miserable past.' 
  
  Nixon’s administration only announced two days earlier that the speech would be a televised address and did not release the customary advanced copy of the speech to the media. All of the networks carried the address, but with limited time for commentators to analyse the text of the speech, Nixon was able to present his views on busing with almost no critical commentary. Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey called the speech a 'TV commercial' for antibusing views, and Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP, criticized Nixon for using his televised address to speak 'as a committed advocate of one side of a major national controversy' and wrote to ABC, CBS and NBC to request equal time to reply. As Nixon’s critics understood, the president was in a unique position to shape the debate over busing and through television he used this power to normalize resistance to federal court school desegregation orders.
  
  By the time Nixon delivered this speech in 1972 March, busing for school desegregation had emerged as one of the nation’s most controversial political issues. In the mid-1960s, city-level voluntary busing programmes in started in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and other cities. While these programmes addressed only a fraction of the school segregation in these cities, they sparked protests among white parents defending what they called 'neighbourhood schools'. After the US Supreme Court called for states to take proactive steps to integrate schools in Green v. County School Board (1968), federal judge James McMillan’s ruling in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1969) called for comprehensive desegregation which would require busing. The US Supreme Court upheld Swann in 1971, with Chief Justice Warren Burger writing that busing was an acceptable 'remedial technique' to achieve comprehensive desegregation. Before the end of the year, there were more than 40 lower court decisions made in line with Swann. Outside of the South, judges found evidence of unconstitutional school segregation in cities like Denver, Pasadena and Pontiac and ordered school boards to implement plans to integrate their schools by changing attendance zones, altering school siting policies and, most commonly, by transporting students by school buses. While court-ordered busing for school desegregation never affected more than 10 per cent of public school students, politicians and parents railed continuously against 'busing,' arguing that the rights of parents and homeowners were being violated by activist judges and federal bureaucrats.
   
  Focusing on Florida Governor Claude Kirk and Pontiac housewife activist Irene McCabe, this essay examines how busing opponents turned the conventions of television news – its emphasis on newsworthy events and crisis; its selective use of historical context; and its nominal political neutrality – to their advantage, staging television-friendly protests that positioned mothers and children as victims of activist judges and federal bureaucrats, and framed their support for segregated neighbourhoods and schools in the colour-blind rhetoric of homeowners’ rights. For politicians who aspired to the national stage, like Florida Governor Claude Kirk, busing offered a recognizable issue on which to take a stand. When Kirk protested court-ordered busing by suspending a local school board in Manatee County (Bradenton, Florida) and appointing himself school superintendent, he was not only appealing to Florida voters but also to television viewers in cities like Nashville, St Louis and Seattle, many of whom wrote to convey their support. When Vice President Spiro Agnew complained that television network news 'can elevate men from obscurity to national prominence within a week' he was referring to Black Power author and activist Stokely Carmichael, but television news also propelled grassroots anti-busing activists like Irene McCabe to national prominence. McCabe, who staged a widely covered six-week march from Pontiac to Washington DC to protest busing, made frequent television appearances because networks deemed her newsworthy, not necessarily because newscasters agreed with her politics. Repeated television coverage turned relatively minor busing battles in Bradenton and Pontiac into national news and established Kirk and McCabe as icons of busing opposition in the early 1970s.
   
  The fact that television news took up 'forced busing', 'massive busing', and 'neighbourhood schools' as politically neutral descriptions vexed supporters of integration to no end. Pontiac mother Carole Sweeney put it bluntly in her testimony to the Senate committee on equal educational opportunity, 'Busing is a red herring, a euphemism. My white friends at the bus depot on the first day of school were not called bus lovers. They were called nigger lovers.'  Claude Kirk, Irene McCabe and other politicians and parents who opposed school desegregation used television successfully because they made the story about busing rather than race. Anti-busing arguments were particularly persuasive on television news because they voiced demands for neighbourhood schools that circulated with little discussion of how these neighbourhoods and schools became segregated. Without reference to housing covenants, federal mortgage redlining, white homeowners associations or discriminatory practices by the real estate industry, neighbourhood segregation appeared to be an innocent matter of personal choice. Viewing school segregation as the natural result of private housing decisions required judges, politicians and parents to adopt what George Lipsitz calls an 'epistemology of ignorance' dependent on the distortion, erasure and occlusion of the clear and consistent evidence of racially discriminatory policies in education. Television news contributed to this 'epistemology of ignorance' through regular coverage of anti-busing protests without the historical or legal context for the busing orders. Without this historical context, anti-busing activists and politicians could convincingly present busing as an unnecessary and unjust display of federal power. Busing, in this view, seemingly came from nowhere. Race and deeply entrenched structures of anti-black racism were always part of the story of school desegregation, but in focusing on protests by politicians and activists like Kirk and McCabe, television news kept race and racism just out of focus.
  
  Understanding how parents and politicians successfully used television to lobby against the major civil rights issue of the 1970s builds on scholars like Aniko Bodroghkozy, Steven Classen, Herman Gray and Sasha Torres who have shown the importance of television to the history and memory of the civil rights movement, as well as scholars of grassroots conservative politics like Donald Critchlow, Lisa McGirr, Michelle Nickerson and Catherine Rymph. In this way, this essay contributes to scholarship on conservative media practices, which as television studies scholar Amanda Lotz recently noted in Cinema Journal, 'remains limited'. The busing debate foregrounded competing ways of conceptualizing space (e.g., metropolitan school districts vs. neighbourhood schools) and understanding how television framed these issues builds on the work of scholars like Anna McCarthy and Lynn Spigel who have explored the spatial relationships engendered by television, as well as historians like Jack Dougherty, Ansley Erickson, Matthew Lassiter and Jeanne Theoharis who examine the interconnections among schools, cites and suburbs, and local and national politics. 
  
  My analysis of how Kirk and McCabe, working at the state and local levels, leveraged the specific characteristics of television news to reach national television audiences also builds on work on television news and social movements by Bonnie Dow, Todd Giltin and Gaye Tuchman, as well as local histories of school desegregation and busing by historians like William Chafe, Davison Douglas, Ronald Formisano, Brett Gadsden, Tracy K’Meyer, Gregory Jacobs and Robert Pratt. These angles of analysis are important, because despite important case-studies on busing in metropolitan areas, social and political historians have not attended to the media strategies of anti-busing protestors or how television news framed local busing fights as part of a larger national story. Similarly, none of public policy scholar Gary Orfield’s extensive publications on busing and school desegregation makes more than a passing mention of television, nor do the works of analysts, like Christine Rossell or David Armor, who argued against busing.
  
  Focusing on television coverage of busing also offers a new angle from which to examine what historian Matthew Lassiter calls 'regional convergence'. As Lassiter describes, the Nixon administration contributed to, and benefited from, the South converging with the North, East and West, to form a new national politics in which the rights and consumer preferences of white middle-class (largely suburban) homeowners were paramount. This political platform disavowed explicit appeals to anti-black racism in favour of colour-blind rhetoric to justify segregated neighbourhoods and schools. Nixon called these voters the 'Silent Majority' (and elsewhere the 'Forgotten Americans' and the 'New American Majority'). Television coverage of busing played an important role in this regional convergence because newscasts made it clear that resistance to school integration was not unique to the South. Anti-busing protests in Louisville and Memphis looked a lot like protests in Cleveland and Seattle and television helped to make this regional convergence visible. Television networks, encouraged both by commercial interests and charges of liberal bias from the Nixon administration and other conservative critics, were invested in articulating their national reach to viewers and advertisers. Where the Nixon administration saw white suburban families as the 'Silent Majority', television news networks saw these same households as their largest and most profitable demographic. Nixon’s statements on busing, like the 1972 March speech, made this regional convergence explicit, emphasizing that cities and school districts in the 'North, East, West, and South…have been torn apart in debate over this issue'. If television viewers watching Nixon’s speech needed evidence of the national reach of the busing issue, they only needed to watch the nightly news for an update on Irene McCabe’s 620-mile trek from Pontiac to Washington DC in support of a constitutional amendment sponsored by Norman Lent, a US congressman from New York.  Television news made busing battles in Bradenton and Pontiac meaningful for national audience, but did little to illuminate the historical and legal context for segregated schools in these cities.
• 1 2013-07-22T10:26:21-07:00 Mothers' march on Washington 37 plain 2016-03-04T14:02:52-08:00 McCabe’s most successful and widely reported event was a 620-mile 'mothers’ march' from Pontiac to Washington DC, to support a constitutional amendment prohibiting busing. The specific length of the march was selected to match the number of the anti-busing amendment sponsored by Norman Lent, House Joint Resolution 620 (HJ Res. 620). As a State Senator representing Naussau County, Long Island, Lent had introduced a similar anti-busing bill that passed the House and Senate in New York and was signed into law by Governor Nelson Rockefeller in 1969, before being found unconstitutional by a federal court the following year. The Lent-Kunzeman 'neighborhood schools' bill generated national interest among integration opponents, and became a model for similar 'freedom of choice' school legislation in several Southern states, including Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama. New York’s anti-busing bill also influenced US Senator John Stennis of Mississippi, who in 1970 introduced an amendment calling for a uniform national school desegregation policy, with the hope of sparking more national opposition to busing and desegregation. As Lent campaigned for HJ Res. 620 in 1972, the Long Island Press noted that the support for anti-busing legislation among Northern congressional representatives made a 'prophet' out of Stennis. The HJ Res. 620 amendment read, 'No public school student shall, because of his race, creed, or colour, be assigned to or required to attend a particular school' and 'Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.' 'I stole the language from the Federal Civil Rights Law of 1964', Lent boasted, which 'has liberals in Washington in a state of apoplectic disarray'. Like supporters of Southern 'freedom of choice' plans, Lent’s amendment identified and sought to exploit the fact that Title IV, Sec. 401b of the Federal Civil Rights Law of 1964 drew a sharp distinction between de jure and de facto segregation: '"Desegregation" means the assignment of students to public schools and within such schools without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin, but "desegregation" shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance.' While Yale University Law School professor Alexander Bickel contended that HJ Res. 620 'would justly be read as repudiating Brown v. Board of Education' and Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, chairman of the Commission on Civil Rights and President of Notre Dame University, criticized it as a 'fundamentally antiblack amendment', Lent contended that 'House Joint Resolution 620 is intended to restore the rule of the Brown cases to our Constitution, our laws and our institutions and to reverse Swann and other departures from the Brown mandate of color-blindness.' 'If it was wrong in 1954 to assign a black child to a particular school on the basis of race, it is just as wrong to do the same thing to other children in 1972,' Lent argued. 'This is "Jim Crowism" in reverse.' Among nearly 40 anti-busing constitutional amendments proposed in 1971 and 1972, HJ Res. 620 received the most attention because of Lent’s status as a Northern busing opponent and because Lent’s amendment received grassroots support, most visibly from McCabe and Pontiac’s marching mothers.
  
  McCabe and five other Pontiac mothers set off on their six-week trek on 15 March 1972, and both print and television reporters noted the historical echoes of the event. 'How and why', one article asked, 'did the trim housewife emerge as a national figure emulating the tactics of the civil rights marchers of the '60s?' At the Pontiac sendoff to McCabe and the marching mothers, ABC’s Jim Kincaid noted, 'Irene McCabe and her National Action Group have taken a page from other demonstrations in the past. It won’t be the first walk to Washington, it may be one of the longest.' In addition to the clear reference to the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the marchers also made a side trip to Massillion, Ohio, the starting point of Coxey’s Army March on Washington by unemployed workers in 1894. As these historical precedents suggest, McCabe’s 'mothers’ march' was designed to be easily recognized as a newsworthy event.
  
  Early in the march, McCabe told a newspaper reporter, 'This is not my favorite thing – walking, but hopefully people will look along the way at six miserable women on television and write their congressman in favor of the [anti-busing] amendment.' As McCabe’s reference to 'six miserable women' indicates, the physical pain the marchers endured was a recurring theme in the print coverage of the march. Two weeks into the walk, one marcher had her calves wrapped in bandages and McCabe noted, 'I’m wearing sun glasses to hide the tears.' After particularly hilly terrain in West Virginia, McCabe told a waiting reporter, 'When you consider what we’ve been through, its amazing. You think your chest is going to pop open, your heart explodes and then there’s another vicious, vicious hill to climb.' A photo of McCabe soaking her feet accompanied a story on the marching mothers’ arrival in Maryland. Just a day before reaching Washington DC, McCabe stopped for medical treatment on her feet. 'I simply could not bear the pain any longer', she said. 'It has been this way for almost two weeks. Every step, I don’t know for how many days, has just been agony.' The marching mothers’ misery became as much a part of the story as their opposition to busing. The Associated Press and United Press International distributed dozens of stories on the march which appeared in newspapers across the country, and this print media coverage served as advance promotion for the culminating rally when the mothers reached Washington DC at the end of April 1972. The news reports inspired a group of eight mothers from Richmond, Virginia to walk 100 miles to join the Pontiac marchers. 'Irene McCabe is a national heroine', said one of the Richmond mothers. 'It was a spur of the moment thing, but I figured if she could walk 620 miles from Pontiac, Mich., to Washington then I could do it from Virginia.' Sandi Cahoon, leader of the Richmond mothers, told reporters, 'the South will rise again, and so will the North, the East and the West – as long as there are freedom loving, God-fearing, dedicated Americans like [McCabe].' Calling McCabe 'a Joan of Arc', Cahoon continued, 'Don’t bother with Vogue magazine, the marching mothers are the beautiful people'.
  
  For these Richmond mothers and many other busing opponents, the march raised McCabe’s profile and helped establish her as a representative voice of the 'silent majority' in the busing debate. When Nixon gave his 1972 March speech calling on Congress to pass a moratorium on new busing orders, for example, McCabe’s reaction to the speech was quoted alongside presidential candidates like George Wallace and George McGovern, politicians like Gerald Ford and Jacob Javits and NAACP national executives Roy Wilkins and Clarence Mitchell. At least two local papers ran photos of McCabe above wire service stories about Nixon’s speech. McCabe, who watched the speech with the other marching mothers at a motel in Taylor, Michigan, told reporters that the 'President took a good antibusing position but didn’t propose the right solution…all we have is this great flood of rhetoric. We’re going to choke on rhetoric and I’ve very disappointed because I love this President.' All of the attention to McCabe’s opinion of Nixon’s televised speech further established her as an important and newsworthy voice in the national school desegregation controversy. 
   
  After the 44-day march, television cameras from ABC, CBS and NBC followed McCabe and the other mothers as they arrived in Washington DC. The coverage on each station picked up the themes that circulated in print coverage of the march over the prior six weeks, emphasizing that the marchers were attempting to bring national political attention to the busing issue, that they had endured physical pain during their long walk Washington and, most importantly, that they undertook the march as mothers. To symbolize their roles as housewives and mothers, McCabe and the other marchers wore aprons with their names and references to HJ 620. The marchers' first stop at the steps of the Capitol, where they met with then Michigan Congressman Gerald Ford, Tennessee Senator William Brock (who sponsored the anti-busing amendment in the Senate), Massachusetts Congresswoman and anti-busing leader Louis Day Hicks, and several other prominent politicians, reminded viewers of the political purpose of the mothers' march. As the mothers walked the final blocks to the anti-busing rally on the grounds of the Washington monument, the television reports segued to focus on how the mothers, and especially McCabe, had gamely suffered in support of their cause. Each station mentioned the mothers’ feet and the how sore they were after miles of walking. CBS cut to a medium shot of three of the mothers’ feet, while reporter Tony Sargent said: 'Mrs. McCabe and the others all had foot and leg problems along the way, some requiring doctor’s care.' These scenes made the mothers’ suffering, described in dozens of newspapers stories filed during the march, visible to a national television audience.
  
  Not coincidentally, McCabe’s speech at the rally picked up this theme, connecting the physical pain of the march and the pain childbirth to the building of an anti-busing coalition. As a band played Nancy Sinatra’s 'These Boots Are Made for Walking', McCabe limped visibly as she approached a podium, outfitted with several microphones. 'I can’t believe we walked the whole way,' she told the crowd.
   

  I personally have suffered a great deal of pain on this walk. It was far more physically grueling than I ever could have imagined. The only time I have ever been in such pain has been in labor. Whenever you’re in labor, you finally give birth to something beautiful. We’ve labored long and we’ve been through a great deal of pain, but it’s worth it, because we have given birth to the rekindling of the government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Look, you’re here!

  
  Like the Mothers of Conservatism featured in Michelle Nickerson’s book, McCabe claimed the authority to speak based on her status as a mother and her related ability to present a common sense view on a complex political issue. While McCabe’s rhetoric drew on familiar themes of motherhood and populism, television gave her rallying cries a crucial visual component and broadcast her message on a scale inaccessible to the vast majority of grassroots female activists.
  
  At the end of McCabe’s speech, each network followed her cue ('Look, you’re here!') and cut to reaction shots of the crowd. Those gathered, almost all white and mostly women, hold clearly worded placards readings 'Stop Forced Busing', 'Pass HJ Res 620', and 'Welcome Irene'. Behind the crowd, the Washington monument is visible, ringed by U.S. flags. It is an impressive, but misleading sight. While McCabe initially said she expected 250,000 anti-busing supporters to attend the rally, and the march promoters promised 10,000 people, the Washington Post estimated that only 500 to 800 people attended the anti-busing rally. CBS’s Tony Sargent noted drily, 'Despite Mrs. McCabe’s dramatic march, today’s turnout was far smaller than expected.' L. Brooks Patterson, NAG’s attorney, expressed his disappointment at the low turnout 'This hillside should have been covered with all your neighbors and friends,' he told the crowd. 'They scream the loudest when their children are bused and they should be here to protest.'
  
  In Michigan, the rally’s ability accurately to represent public opposition to busing became a point of contention. While the Michigan House of Representatives passed a resolution (by a 61-28 vote) to honor McCabe, calling her 'the symbol of tens of millions of people who are opposed to forced busing', the Detroit Urban League questioned this symbolism. 'With the small rally turnout Mrs. McCabe received in Washington, how can the House assume or even support the notion that Mrs. McCabe represents such a large segment of the American population?' asked Detroit Urban League executive director Francis Kornegay. For her part, McCabe said 'I didn’t expect many people', because her anti-busing supporters are 'working people' who 'can’t afford to lose a day’s pay', but expressed her frustration with the turnout to the Washington Post, 'If I can give up a year of my life (to fight busing) why can’t they turn out for day?'
  
  McCabe’s disappointment was no doubt sincere, but it underestimated the march’s success as a media event. The march reportedly cost $7,500 and was paid for by fund raising in Pontiac and along the parade route. Despite this small budget, the march generated daily newspaper reports and television news coverage of the marchers’ departure from Pontiac and their arrival in Washington, DC. Here again, news media, and especially television, helped McCabe dramatically scale-up her anti-busing message. Television news brought McCabe’s rally, which despite a month of advance publicity failed to draw 1,000 people, to a national audience of millions of television viewers. By any accounting, this was an extraordinary return on the time and money McCabe and NAG invested in the march. Given the legislative challenges of passing a constitutional amendment, moreover, HJ Res. 620 and other anti-busing amendments were primarily intended as symbolic political maneuvers. In this light, while HJ Res. 620 never had any real chance of passing, the mothers’ march to Washington generated a tremendous amount of press attention for anti-busing views.
  
  While busing continued to be a major political issue throughout the 1970s, the mothers’ march on Washington was the pinnacle of McCabe’s political career. In Pontiac, tensions emerged within NAG over the media’s focus on McCabe and over her leadership style. When asked what the march had accomplished, marcher Lorene Fligger noted, 'Well, in my case, I walked to Washington.' Another mother, Ardith Heineman, who quit NAG shortly after the march, said, 'Irene’s style of doing things is to tell you to do it. If you ask questions she whirls on you and tells you not the straddle the fence.' By February 1973, the Associated Press reported, 'The National Action Group (NAG), once the most vocal and best publicized anti-busing group in the nation, has fallen into a state of near chaos.' As NAG meetings became increasingly contentious and McCabe faced challenges from rival NAG factions, she stepped down, lamenting, 'Too many people are interested in fighting me and not fighting busing.' After leaving NAG, McCabe campaigned unsuccessfully for a position on the county board of supervisors and floated the idea of challenging Michigan Senator Philip Hart for his seat. Unlike Boston’s Louis Day Hicks or Los Angeles’ Bobbi Fiedler, both of whom were elected to the US House of Representations largely on the strength of their anti-busing credentials, McCabe’s campaign did not lead to success in electoral politics. McCabe expressed frustration that the politicians and political advisors who had once eagerly met with her ignored her once she was out of the national spotlight. After L.Brooks Patterson, former NAG legal advisor, was elected county prosecutor, McCabe noted, 'I was once his voice of the average person. He doesn’t need me now. He’s elected. A guy from Hazel Park [a Detroit suburb] told me a long time ago, "they’re gonna use you, honey." He was right.' McCabe also questioned the sincerity of John Ehrlichman, President Nixon’s chief domestic affairs advisor, with whom she met after the mothers’ march on Washington and who indicated that Nixon would support a constitutional amendment opposing busing. 'Perhaps he used us as a ploy to quiet down the antibusing protesting voices', she told a reporter. 'I’ll never lift a hand to support another political hack', she later declared.
• 1 media/Scalar UH background 2.jpg 2014-09-15T15:34:29-07:00 Introduction 36 plain 2016-03-06T06:25:50-08:00 Matt Delmont, Guest Editor
  
  The fields of urban history and visual culture both thrive on expansive horizons. Streets and rivers, neighbourhoods and stadia, festivals and parks populate the work of urban historians, who examine these and other subjects from local, metropolitan, regional, national and transnational perspectives. Viewing these urban themes with and through visual culture increases the potential areas of analysis exponentially. Not only do photography, film, television and advertising produce countless images of urban spaces, visual culture encourages scholars to take seriously the ways of seeing and practices of looking that shape how people understand and engage with the metropolis. Visual technologies, both old and new, make places meaningful in ways that have broad cultural, political and economic consequences. As digital tools continue to make more urban spaces visible to more people, scholars have a crucial role to play in researching, organizing, contextualizing and analysing these myriad urban sights.
  
  Using the Scalar online authoring platform, this online only special issue argues that visual forms and ways of seeing are crucial to understanding urban history. Drawing on photography, painting, film, television and other visual and textual evidence, these essays explore how diverse visual forms not only shape metropolitan spaces, experiences and identities, but also shape the ways in which people imagine, remember and forget such spaces and events. Focusing on post-war urban history this issue attends to questions of community, race, class, gender, sexuality, modernity and memory. These questions, familiar to urban historians, can be seen from new angles by foregrounding the visual elements of urban political, economic, social and cultural life. By presenting this special issue through Scalar, we hope to offer both new research on urban visual history and also new models for the visual and textual presentation of such research. In contrast to a traditional print issue, Scalar affords the opportunity to present a large number of images, including colour images; present selected clips from films and television that are analysed in the essays; and create visualizations to present evidence in more dynamic ways.
  
  The authors of this special issue are trained in History, American Studies, Architecture, Art History and Communications, and this special issue builds on the work of scholars who have examined urban history and visual culture from multidisciplinary perspectives. The work of Cécile Whiting, Joshua Shannon and Rebecca Zurier offer important insights on art and the city, while Dana Cuff, Margaret Farrar, Christopher Klemek and Samuel Zipp have outlined the importance of images in urban renewal. Media Studies scholars Anna McCarthy, Lynn Spigel Marita Sturken and Pamela Wojcik have offered important analyses of the spatial relationships in film and television, while the work of Aniko Bodroghkozy, Herman Gray, Melanie McAlister, Vinzenz Hediger, Patrick Vonderau and Sasha Torres traces the importance of visual media in building, mobilizing, contesting and controlling cities and nations. Taken together, this special issue examines the inseparable relationship between what Carlo Rotella describes as 'the city of feeling (constructed in words and images) and the city of fact (made of steel and stone, inhabited by flesh-and-blood people)'.
  
  In the first essay, Laura Grantmyre examines competing visions of urban renewal in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District in the 1950s and 1960s. While the city’s redevelopment agency circulated images focused on the neighbourhood’s built environment, presenting it as desolate and in disrepair, Charles 'Teenie' Harris, a photojournalist for the Pittsburgh Courier, the city’s African American newspaper, portrayed the neighbourhood as a vibrant community. Grantmyre’s study of visions of urban renewal in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District shows that over 1,800 Lower Hill District families, mostly African American, were uprooted as part of a redevelopment project. For these residents, and thousands of others forcibly displaced by urban renewal, photographs highlight urban erasures and the traumatic tearing apart of communities through urban renewal, which Mindy Fullilove describes as 'root shock'. Grantmyre reminds us that these 'ghost neighbourhoods', as Phil Ethington calls them in the context of Los Angeles, remain part of the visual history and memory of cities. In this context, the photographs of the Lower Hill District taken by Teenie Harris offer an especially important visual archive of a thriving neighbourhood.
  
  Mona Damluji, like Grantmyre, explores the use of visual culture to define urban 'progress' and 'modernity'. Damluji examines how the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum Company’s (IPC) documentary films and public relations materials in the 1950s presented Baghdad as a city made modern through oil industry revenue. The IPC screened the films across Iraq and Damluji argues that these films and their cinematic representations of Iraq’s capital 'worked to legitimate political acts of foreign exploitation and control of Iraqi oil, land and labour'. Similar to how Grantmyre shows the Pittsburgh Housing Authority seeking and receiving support from the African American community for redevelopment efforts, Damluji analyses how an Arabic-language IPC documentary, Assimatun Ajmel (A More Beautiful Capital), shined a favorable light on the destruction of older Baghdad neighbourhoods to make way for a 'capital fit for a modern country.' Gyan Prakash has written that 'urban dwellers experience their globally situated and connected urban space as decidedly local lifeworlds, thick with specific experiences, practices, imaginations and memories'. In Pittsburgh and Baghdad, Grantmyre and Damluji detail how quickly and irrevocably these urban spaces can be destroyed or remade, and how images and films are central to this process.
  
  Bridget Gilman examines representations of everyday cityscapes from another angle in her analysis of Robert Bechtle’s Photorealist paintings of San Francisco. Gilman highlights how Bechtle’s work avoids the city’s natural and architectural icons, or recognizable panoramas from atop one of the city’s many hills, in favour of the 'native vision' of residential streets with large quantities of pavement. Bechtle returned to the same source images frequently and Gilman uses overlay visualizations to show how Bechtle transformed a 'single photograph through variations in medium, colour palette, tonal range and cropping'. Bechtle’s carefully created photograph-based paintings like "Twentieth and Arkansas" and "Twentieth Street VW" speak to a dedication to ordinary scenes and objects and, viewed in the 2010s, defamiliarize the street level photographs that Google Maps Street View has made ubiquitous.
  
  Gilman’s essay emphasizes questions of urban vision – Who can see what? From which locations? With what implications? – that figure prominently in Carrie Rentschler’s analysis of film and video reproductions of the Kitty Genovese case. In 1964, Genovese was raped and murdered in the Kews Gardens neighbourhood in Queens, New York. The violent murder and widely reported failure of neighbours to help Genovese made the case a symbol of urban danger and public apathy. The Genovese case remains one of the most famous examples used in social science and popular texts to describe how built environment shapes human behaviour, with the failure of witnesses to call the police serving as a condemnation of apartment living and of some urban spaces as failed neighbourhoods. Rentschler examines how filmic reenactments and retellings of the Genovese murder, over the past 50 years, raise questions about what it means to be a witness in a vertical city of apartment buildings and trace the architectural and perceptual limits of urban vision. Like Damluji, Rentschler uses Scalar to present and analyse a small archive of films that are not readily available to scholars.
  
  Matt Delmont looks at the flurry of television news coverage garnered by Florida Governor Claude Kirk and Pontiac housewife activist Irene McCabe in the battle over busing for school desegregation in the 1970s. Fearing the image of 'failed neighbourhoods' analysed in Rentschler’s essay, anti-busing politicians and parents mobilized around the concept of 'neighbourhood schools' as sites that needed to be defended from the threat of racial integration. These efforts to protect decades of federally supported racial privilege disavowed explicit appeals to anti-black racism in favour of colour-blind rhetoric to justify segregated neighbourhoods and schools. News coverage brought anti-busing protests in places like Manatee County, Florida and Pontiac, Michigan to millions of television viewers across the nation without the historical or legal context for the busing orders.
  
  By developing this special issue in Scalar we have combined our traditional academic analysis with a wide range of images, photographs, videos, maps and visualizations. Like the Hypercities platform for the layered historical mapping of cities, the Photogrammar archive and visualization platform for United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information photographs, and many other digital humanities platforms, tools and projects, we have used digital technology to expand and extend our historical analysis of and to bring this sustained engagement with the past to a wide audience through an open access online format. It is our hope that readers will find this special issue to be generative for thinking about urban history, visual culture and their presentation online.
  
  Table of contents:
  • Laura Grantmyre, 'Conflicting visions of renewal in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, 1950-1968'
  • Bridget Gilman, 'San Francisco views: Robert Bechtle and the reformulation of urban vision'
  • Mona Damluji, 'Visualizing Iraq: oil, cinema and the modern city'
  • Carrie Rentschler, 'Filmic witness to the 1964 Kitty Genovese murder'
  • Matt Delmont, 'Buses from nowhere: television and anti-busing activism in 1970s urban America'
  You can access essays by clicking on author's names above, or use the main menu on the top left of the screen to navigate to essays.  To view detailed the table of contents with links to each page, click here.
• 1 2014-09-15T16:14:48-07:00 [TEST] Introduction 7 plain 2014-09-17T10:46:36-07:00 Matt Delmont, Guest Editor
  In April 2014, Google publicized a new feature to its Google Maps application. “If you’ve ever dreamt of being a time traveler like Doc Brown, now’s your chance,” the blog post announced. “Starting today, you can travel to the past to see how a place has changed over the years by exploring Street View imagery in Google Maps for desktop. We’ve gathered historical imagery from past Street View collections dating back to 2007 to create this digital time capsule of the world.” While Google Maps is among the most popular and sophisticated digital tools, this announcement highlights that dynamic technologies do not necessarily provide historical depth or historical imagination. The Street View historical imagery is a neat feature if you are interested in how place images have changed over the past seven years, but if, as the blog post suggests, you want to travel back to 1955 like Doc Brown (a fictional character in the 1980s Back to the Future films) you will have to look elsewhere. As digital tools like Google Maps continue to make more urban spaces visible to more people, scholars have a crucial role to play in researching, organizing, contextualizing, and analyzing these myriad urban sights. Using the Scalar online authoring platform, this online only special issue argues that visual forms and ways of seeing are crucial to understanding urban history. Drawing on photography, painting, film, television, and other visual and textual evidence, these essays explore how diverse visual forms not only shape metropolitan spaces, experiences, and identities, but also shape the ways in which people imagine, remember, and forget such spaces and events. Focusing on postwar urban history this issue attends to questions of community, race, class, gender, sexuality, modernity, and memory. These questions, familiar to urban historians, can be seen from new angles by foregrounding the visual elements of urban political, economic, social, and cultural life. By presenting this special issue through Scalar, we hope to offer both new research on urban visual history and also new models for the visual and textual presentation of such research. In contrast to a traditional print issue, Scalar affords the opportunity to present a large number of images, including color images; present selected clips from films and television that are analyzed in the essays; and create visualizations to present evidence in more dynamic ways. The authors of this special issue are trained in History, American Studies, Architecture, Art History, and Communications, and this the special issue builds on the work of scholars who have examined urban history and visual culture from multidisciplinary perspectives. The work of Cécile Whiting, Joshua Shannon, Rebecca Zurier offer important insights on art and the city, while Dana Cuff, Margaret Farrar, Christopher Klemek, and Samuel Zipp have outlined the importance of images in urban renewal. Media Studies scholars Anna McCarthy, Lynn Spigel Marita Sturken, Pamela Wojcik have offered important analyses of the spatial relationships in film and television, while the work of Aniko Bodrokozy, Herman Gray, Melanie McAlister, Vinzenz Hediger, Patrick Vonderau, and Sasha Torres traces the importance of visual media in building, mobilizing, contesting, and controlling cities and nations. Taken together, this special issue examines the inseparable relationship between what Carlo Rotella describes as “the city of feeling (constructed in words and images) and the city of fact (made of steel and stone, inhabited by flesh-and-blood people).” In the first essay, Laura Grantmyre examines competing visions of urban renewal in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District in the 1950s and 1960s. While the city’s redevelopment agency circulated images focused on the neighborhood’s built environment, presenting it as desolate and in disrepair, Charles “Teenie” Harris, a photojournalist for the Pittsburgh Courier, the city’s African American newspaper, portrayed the neighborhood as a vibrant community. Grantmyre’s study of visions of urban renewal in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District shows that over 1,800 Lower Hill District families, mostly African-American, were uprooted as part of a redevelopment project. For these residents, and thousands of others forcibly displaced by urban renewal, photographs highlight urban erasures and the traumatic tearing apart of communities through urban renewal, which Mindy Fullilove describes as “root shock.” Grantmyre reminds us that these “ghost neighborhoods,” as Phil Ethington calls them in the context of Los Angeles, remain part of the visual history and memory of cities. In this context, the photographs of the Lower Hill District taken by Teenie Harris offer an especially important visual archive of a thriving neighborhood. Mona Damluji, like Grantmyre, explores the use of visual culture to define urban “progress” and “modernity.” Damluji examines how the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum Company’s (IPC) documentary films and public relations materials in the 1950s presented Baghdad as a city made modern through oil industry revenue. The IPC screened the films across Iraq and Damluji argues that these films and their cinematic representations of Iraq’s capital “worked to legitimate political acts of foreign exploitation and control of Iraqi oil, land, and labor.” Similar to how Grantmyre shows the Pittsburgh Housing Authority seeking and receiving support from the African-American community for redevelopment efforts, Damluji analyzes how an Arabic-language IPC documentary, Assimatun Ajmel (A More Beautiful Capital), shined a favorable light on the destruction of older Baghdad neighborhoods to make way for a “capital fit for a modern country.” Gyan Prakash has written that “urban dwellers experience their globally situated and connected urban space as decidedly local lifeworlds, thick with specific experiences, practices, imaginations, and memories.” In Pittsburgh and Baghdad, Grantmyre and Damluji detail how quickly and irrevocably these urban spaces can be destroyed or remade, and how images and films are central to this process. Bridget Gilman examines representations of everyday cityscapes from another angle in her analysis of Robert Bechtle’s Photorealist paintings of San Francisco. Gilman highlights how Bechtle’s work avoids the city’s natural and architectural icons, or recognizable panoramas from atop one of the city’s many hills, in favor of the “native vision” of residential streets with large quantities of pavement. Bechtle returned to the same source images frequently and Gilman uses overlay visualizations to show how Bechtle transformed a “single photograph through variations in medium, color palette, tonal range and cropping.” Bechtle’s carefully created photograph-based paintings like Twentieth and Arkansas and Twentieth Street VW speak to a dedication to ordinary scenes and objects and, viewed in the 2010s, defamiliarize the street level photographs that Google Maps Street View has made ubiquitous. Gilman’s essay emphasizes questions of urban vision—Who can see what? From which locations? With what implications?—that figure prominently in Carrie Rentschler’s analysis of film and video reproductions of the Kitty Genovese case. In 1964 Genovese was raped and murdered in the Kews Garden neighborhood in Queens, New York. The violent murder and widely reported failure of neighbors to help Genovese made the case a symbol of urban danger and public apathy. The Genovese case remains one of the most famous examples used in social science and popular texts to describe how built environment shapes human behavior, with the failure of witnesses to call the police serving as a condemnation of apartment living and of some urban spaces as failed neighborhoods. Rentschler examines how filmic reenactments and retellings of the Genovese murder, over the past fifty years, raise questions about what it means to be a witness in a vertical city of apartment buildings and trace the architectural and perceptual limits of urban vision. Like Damluji, Rentschler uses Scalar to present and analyze a small archive of films that are not readily available to scholars. Matt Delmont looks at the flurry of television news coverage garnered by Florida Governor Claude Kirk and Pontiac housewife activist Irene McCabe in the battle over busing for school desegregation in the 1970s. Fearing the image of “failed neighborhoods” analyzed in Rentschler’s essay, anti-busing politicians and parents mobilized around the concept of “neighborhood schools” as sites that needed to be defended from the threat of racial integration. These efforts to protect decades of federally supported racial privilege disavowed explicit appeals to anti-black racism in favor of color-blind rhetoric to justify segregated neighborhoods and schools. News coverage brought anti-busing protests in places like Manatee County, Florida and Pontiac, Michigan to millions of television viewers across the nation without the historical or legal context for the busing orders. By developing this special issue in Scalar we have combined our traditional academic analysis with a wide range of images, photographs, videos, maps and visualizations. Like the Hypercities platform for the layered historical mapping of cities, the Curatescape Omeka application for public history storytelling, the Photogrammar archive and visualization platform for United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information photographs, and many other digital humanities platforms, tools, and projects, we have used digital technology to expand and extend our historical analysis of and to bring this sustained engagement with the past to a wide audience through an open access online format. It is our hope that readers will find this special issue to be generative for thinking about urban history, visual culture, and their presentation online. Table of Contents:
  • Laura Grantmyre, "Conflicting Representational Discourses of Urban 'Renewal' in Pittsburgh’s Hill District: Was a vibrant community supplanted by a symbol of racial injustice or was a desolate slum replaced by a marvel of urban modernism?"
  • Bridget Gilman, "San Francisco Views: Robert Bechtle and the Reformulation of Urban Vision"
  • Mona Damluji, "Visualizing Iraq: Oil, Cinema, and the Modern City"
  • Carrie Rentschler, "The Archive as Witness to the 1964 Kitty Genovese Murder"
  • Matt Delmont, "Buses from Nowhere: Television and Anti-busing Activism in 1970s Urban America"
  You can access essays by clicking on author's names above, or use main menu on top left of screen to navigate to essays.