Oxford Encyclopedia of American Urban History

The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Urban History synthesizes three generations of urban historical scholarship, providing a thematic and chronological overview of American urban history from the pre-Columbian era until the beginning decades of the twenty-first century. The 92 articles collected in these two volumes describe and analyze the transformation of the United States from a simple agrarian and small-town society to a complex urban and suburban nation. Each article has been authored, peer-reviewed, and edited by scholars expert in the field, offering a reliable, historiographically informed examination of a specific subject in American urban history.

The Encyclopedia differs from previous publications by providing semi-structured, synoptic articles ranging from 6,000 to 8,000 words or more. Each article is divided into three parts: 1. an accessible narrative overview of an important issue in American urban history; 2. a brief historiographical summary of significant writers and publications on the subject; and 3. a short introduction to essential primary sources. This tri-part format allows each article to serve multiple audiences: those who simply want an informed an intelligent introduction to a given topic; those interested in identifying the leading publications on a specific subject; and those interested in performing more detailed research.

Timothy J. Gilfoyle is a professor and former chair of history at Loyola University Chicago, where he teaches American urban and social history. He is also a past president of the Urban History Association and an associate editor of the Journal of Urban History. Gilfoyle's research focuses on the development and evolution of various 19th-century urban underworld subcultures and informal economies, exemplified by A Pickpocket's Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York (W. W. Norton, 2006); City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (W. W. Norton,1992); and most recently The Urban Underworld in Late Nineteenth-Century New York: The Autobiography of George Appo (Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 2013). His other books include Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Flash Press: Sporting Men's Weeklies in the 1840s, coauthored with Patricia Cline Cohen and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz (University of Chicago Press, 2008).