City Trenches

“Literate style and pungent analysis make City Trenches a great pleasure to read. Katznelson brilliantly illuminates the distinctive contours of urban politics in the United States and opens new vistas for the comparative history of work, community, and class in all industrial-capitalist democracies.”
—Theda Skocpol, Institute for Advanced Study, Member, 1980–1981
 
“A fascinating, original, and important account of how the historic separation of work from community in America has profoundly shaped political behavior. Using a unique combination of macrohistorical analysis of class and urbanism in America with a case study of a northern Manhattan community, this book captures the distinctive organizational, linguistic, and ideological aspects of American urban politics.”
—William Julius Wilson, Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology, University of Chicago
 
“City Trenches is one of the two or three best books on American city politics published in the past fifteen years. It provides the most persuasive analysis I have ever encountered of the central puzzle of recent urban politics—the sources and nature of political turmoil in American cities during the 1960s, and how political order was restored at the end of that turbulent decade. Sheds entirely new light on the relationship between social class and politics in the United States.”
—Martin Shefter, Cornell University
 
“City Trenches is one of the few works which combine a structural and historically sensitive analysis of American society with an empirical analysis of a microcosm of that society. On the frontiers of a theory of the political economy of urban growth and urban social movements.”
—Robert R. Alford, University of California, Santa Cruz