History books, if they stick around long enough, eventually become artifacts of their own eras, history in a double sense: explaining earlier periods with the terms and perspectives of their own time, which look different decades later. In the last chapter of Crabgrass Frontier, Kenneth T. Jackson helps the process along by offering his expectations of how the trends he documented in the rest of the book were likely to play out in coming decades. That Jackson can make the attempt is a testimony to the thoroughness of his research and to the durability of the trends that he found. I’m sure the book is no longer the state of the art, forty years after its publication, but I’m equally sure that I learned an immense amount, and that it gave me a solid foundation to build on, if I wanted to expand my knowledge of American suburbia.

The subtitle of Crabgrass Frontier is “The Suburbanization of the United States,” and Jackson tells the story of how American cities came to be so spread out, how, by 1980, more people in metropolitan areas came to live in the communities that ringed the central cities than in the cities themselves. If I had been asked about suburbanization before I read the book, I would have said that some of it came with electric trolleys but most of it came after World War II. I would have been wrong. Jackson goes back to the early stages of American cities and shows how suburbs were already springing up before the Civil War. Indeed, if cities in the 19th century had not aggressively annexed the suburban communities surrounding the urban cores, they might well have been eclipsed by their suburbs in the 1850s. Jackson digs deep, and he shows how, when, where, why, and in many cases exactly who.

One of the book’s advantages is its clear organization, improved by Jackson’s tendency to enumerate factors that contribute to his argument. The introduction features four characteristics that differentiate American cities from those of comparably wealthy countries elsewhere in the world. (Those are low residential density coupled with the absence of a sharp division between town and country; a “strong penchant for homeownership;” the “socioeconomic distinction between the center and the periphery,” with wealth in the US out in the suburbs rather than the city center; and the “length of the average journey-to-work.”) Subsequent chapters have, for example, five characteristics of walkable cities that pre-date the industrial revolution (Ch. 1); two policies of streetcar entrepreneurs that were “especially important in facilitating the outward movement of [the] population” (p. 119); or four factors that explain high rates of homeownership in the US (p. 132), though in Jackson’s estimation they are only partial explanations. Throughout the book his rat-a-tat-tat of theses and examples makes his points clearly, and the guidance that his listing of points provides helps to keep readers from getting lost in a mass of detail.

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