Urban renewal of the 1950s through 1970s has acquired a poor reputation, much of it deserved. But reducing it to an unchanging story of urban destruction misses some important legacies and genuinely progressive goals. Those include efforts to create more socially integrated communities, to involve suburbs in solving metropolitan inequality, and to hold the federal government responsible for funding more affordable housing and other urban investments, rather than turn primarily to the private sector. Cohen will revisit this history by following the long career of Edward J. Logue, whose career spanned from New Haven in the 1950s to the South Bronx in the 1980s.

Lizabeth Cohen is the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies and a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of History at Harvard. From 2011-18 she was the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In addition to Saving America’s Cities (2019), she is the author of Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (1990), winner of the Bancroft Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer, and A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (2003).  

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is sponsored jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest and the George Washington University History Department for their support.