ABSTRACT
Any expectation that American city life would resume in the postWorld War II era where it had left off in 1940 quickly proved illusory. Some of the old bones of contention had worn thin. Protestant-Catholic feuding faded into insignificance, virtually erased by the autumn of 1960 with the election of the first Roman Catholic President. In the economic realm, some issues took new form. The main problems were the unforeseen and those that acquired such intensity as to seem unfamiliar: the overwhelming growth of city and metropolitan regional populations that threatened in some sections of the country to leave no open country whatsoever, the rising number of school children to be educated and, at the other end of the age spectrum, the multiplying over age65 groups; the devastating inroads of automobile traffic which increasingly transformed residential neighbourhoods of central cities into noisy, smog-laden passageways; and a mounting racial consciousness focussed upon Negro civil rights and schooling. Most of these situation were closely intertwined. Search for solutions failed to open up sure paths through the tangle. Only one fact was clear by i960: all American social history had become in essence urban history.
