Suburbs, General
Virginia
- George Mason University. Oral History Project. Mason's oral history collections include interviews with Northern Virginians, with emphasis on schooling and planned communities, especially Reston. Some interviews have been digitized.
- George Mason University. Simplicity, Permanence, and Economy. An exhibit about the design of Mason's original campus.
- Kozel, Scott M. Roads to the Future. Information about highways and rail projects, with emphases on the Washington, D.C., and Hampton Roads areas.
- Reston Historic Trust. Information about Reston's past, including a full scan of the 1962 master plan (PDF).
- Reston Planned Community Archives. Digitized materials from Reston's past.
- Schrag, Zachary M. Building the Washington Metro: An Online Exhibit. My site at George Mason University tells Metro's story with 70 photographs, maps, and other images.
- Washington Post. Instructions for accessing the Washington Post, 1877-1988, with a Loudoun County library card.
Bibliography
- Baxandall, Rosalyn Fraad, and Elizabeth Ewen. Picture Windows: how the suburbs happened. New York, NY : Basic Books, 2000.
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Emphasis on Long Island; rich in oral history.
- Ceruzzi, Paul. “Tysons Corner, Virginia.” Knowledge, Technology, and Policy 13 (June 2000): 86 - 102
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Some background on the coming of defense contracting.
- Fishman, Robert, Bourgeois utopias: the rise and fall of suburbia. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
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Along with Crabgrass Frontier (below), part of an earlier generation of scholarship on the suburbs, with emphasis on wealthy, white residential suburbs.
- Hayden, Dolores. Building suburbia : green fields and urban growth, 1820-2000. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003.
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A recent survey of suburban history, with references to some of the books on this list.
- Hayden, Dolores. A Field Guide to Sprawl . New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.
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Compelling aerial photography by Jim Wark.
- Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass frontier: the suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
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See Fishman, above.
- Kruse, Kevin M., and Thomas J. Sugrue, eds. The New Suburban History. University of Chicago Press, 2006.
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Essays extracted from some of the most recent books in the field; a good introduction to the latest approaches to the subject.
- Rome, Adam Ward. The bulldozer in the countryside: suburban sprawl and the rise of American environmentalism. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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A detailed account of the consequences of hasty postwar development.
- Schrag, Zachary M. The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
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Chapter 9 contrasts Metro-related planning in Arlington and Fairfax counties.
- Stilgoe, John R. Borderland: origins of the American suburb, 1820-1939. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
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Not a book about postwar suburbs, but a good reminder that not everything was new after the Second World War.
- Wiese Andrew. Places of their own : African American suburbanization in the twentieth century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
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An oft-forgotten chapter.
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