American Towns

the long version

"David Russo's history of American towns looks at their founding, development, and the varieties of life they embraced from earliest colonial times to the present. His chronicle is wide-ranging in its description, from coast to coast and border to border. But while his aim is to discern patterns in the lives of American towns, he illustrates these shapes and structures with a great many specific examples of how towns came into existence, grew or declined, and gave way to larger urban areas, and finally have reappeared in idealized forms. It can be fairly said that towns now provide Americans with nostalgia for a past that most of them did not even experience."--BOOK JACKET.