Alison Isenberg. Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It

Although academic and popular observers have mourned the deathof Main Street and blamed its decline on objective economicforces, Alison Isenberg challenges these assumptions in hermonograph Downtown America. Currently an associate professorof history at Rutgers University, she began her study as a doctoraldissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. Isenberg focuseson the changing nature of commercial districts from the latenineteenth century to the present day. She argues that businesspeople, municipal officials, city planners, real estate professionals,downtown residents,     

Amy G. Richter. Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xiii + 272 pp. ISBN 0-8078-2926-9, $49.95 (cloth); ISBN 0-8078-5591-X, $19.95 (paper).

In today’s fast-paced world we sometimes forget that railroadsof the nineteenth century were the first forms of transportationto annihilate time and space. Railroads, however, played a fargreater role than transforming these physical realities. Infact, Amy G. Richter’s Home on the Rails argues that railroadsbecame the sites and symbols of a reorganized cultural spacein America. Richter, an assistant professor of history at ClarkUniversity in Worcester, Massachusetts, began her study as a