This course provides a survey of how the city has been a major subject of American history. The course examines aspects of urban change in nineteenth-century America, including urban design, capitalist transformation, crime, rioting, politics, popular culture, and the social conflict that emerged around efforts to regulate and reform the metropolis and its diverse populations. Then the course studies the twentieth century, with the city as historical site of urban and regional planning, zoning, Jim Crow spatial ordering, class integration and segregation, urban renewal, social activism and gentrification. The course uses specific cities as case studies as it moves through a largely chronological approach to urban history. The survey emphasizes certain places and themes at the exclusion of others, so consider this simply one opening into American urban history among many possibilities.