Here are 100 books that Indian Cities fans have personally recommended if you like
Indian Cities.
Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.
As an immigrant in the United States, I have been fascinated by the dynamics between races and cultures—both in the country and globally. As I travel extensively (63 countries so far), I experience some of the biases firsthand—sometimes in the unlikeliest places. I have come to realize that despite the difference in the color of our skin—and the clothes we wear—we are more alike than different.
I loved the book because it’s an insightful window into the challenges of a troubled community, the native Indians, who are still haunted by the painful past and face an uncertain future. I loved how the writer picks the thread of stories of many characters who have chosen to live outside reservations and then knits them all together in the end.
Unique characters with unique stories and strong evocative writing make There There a remarkable debut.
** Shortlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award **
One of Barack Obama's best books of 2018, the New York Times bestselling novel about contemporary America from a bold new Native American voice
'A thunderclap' Marlon James 'Astonishing' Margaret Atwood, via Twitter 'Pure soaring beauty' Colm Toibin
Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and hoping to reconnect with her estranged family. That's why she is there. Dene is there because he has been collecting stories to honour his uncle's death, while Edwin is looking for his true father and Opal came to watch her boy Orvil dance.
I came to Indigenous history through the experience as a settler growing up at the edge of a reservation. I also love cities as “texts,” and the ways in which urban places never fully erase what came before. These two interests led me to urban Indigenous studies. Urban and Indigenous histories are often treated as though they are mutually exclusive, when in fact they are deeply entangled with each other: for example, the majority of Indigenous people in the United States live in urban areas. These works capture the rich history of migration, political organizing, and cultural production that has taken place in Indigenous cities.
This collection of short stories draws from Van Alst’s experience as a Native American growing up in Chicago, where racism and gang violence were everyday realities. Gripping and uncompromising, the stories walk a line between the traumas of Indigenous life in America and the possibilities of resilience and resistance.
Growing up in a gang in the city can be dark. Growing up Native American in a gang in Chicago is a whole different story. This book takes a trip through that unexplored part of Indian Country, an intense journey that is full of surprises, shining a light on the interior lives of people whose intellectual and emotional concerns are often overlooked. This dark, compelling, occasionally inappropriate, and often hilarious linked story collection introduces a character who defies all stereotypes about urban life and Indians. He will be in readers' heads for a long time to come.
I came to Indigenous history through the experience as a settler growing up at the edge of a reservation. I also love cities as “texts,” and the ways in which urban places never fully erase what came before. These two interests led me to urban Indigenous studies. Urban and Indigenous histories are often treated as though they are mutually exclusive, when in fact they are deeply entangled with each other: for example, the majority of Indigenous people in the United States live in urban areas. These works capture the rich history of migration, political organizing, and cultural production that has taken place in Indigenous cities.
LaPier and Beck’s book is the perfect backstory to Van Alst’s.
Chicago, built on the lands of the Three Fires Council, has a long history as an Indigenous metropolis, from activism around the famous 1893 World’s Fair to the building of urban Indian organizations. The authors show how Indigenous people are everywhere in the archives.
Robert G. Athearn Award from the Western History Association
In City Indian Rosalyn R. LaPier and David R. M. Beck tell the engaging story of American Indians who migrated to Chicago from across America to work and emerged as activists. From the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition to the 1934 Century of Progress Fair, American Indians in Chicago voiced their opinions about political, social, educational, and racial issues. City Indian focuses on the privileged members of the American Indian community in Chicago: doctors, nurses, business owners, teachers, and entertainers. During the Progressive Era more than any other time in the city's…
I came to Indigenous history through the experience as a settler growing up at the edge of a reservation. I also love cities as “texts,” and the ways in which urban places never fully erase what came before. These two interests led me to urban Indigenous studies. Urban and Indigenous histories are often treated as though they are mutually exclusive, when in fact they are deeply entangled with each other: for example, the majority of Indigenous people in the United States live in urban areas. These works capture the rich history of migration, political organizing, and cultural production that has taken place in Indigenous cities.
Rather than focusing on historical archives, this book is based on years of face-to-face research in and with urban Indigenous communities. Deftly describing the urban politics of identity, Jacobs provides insights into the ways in which Indigenous people manage senses of self and community in the twenty-first-century city.
Contemporary accounts of urban Native identity in two pan-Indian communities
In the last half century, changing racial and cultural dynamics in the United States have caused an explosion in the number of people claiming to be American Indian, from just over half a million in 1960 to over three million in 2013. Additionally, seven out of ten American Indians live in or near cities, rather than in tribal communities, and that number is growing.
In Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality, Michelle Jacobs examines the new reality of the American Indian urban experience. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted over two and a…
I am a researcher and professor of Planning and Urban Design at Middle East Technical University, Ankara (Turkiye). I am interested in how we can develop sustainable communities in urban and rural areas, modern and historical areas, and create a much more just world for all living beings. This question has become increasingly important for our life as uncertainties arise. New paradigms appear daily with climate change, wars, energy crises, pandemics, migrations, safety and security, growing diversity, and socio-spatial inequalities. I chose these books because they helped me think of new ways to achieve a sustainable and just world for all living beings.
This is a landmark book that provides an interdisciplinary and global analysis of the 20th-century cities.
Graham and Marvin conceive the city as a flow process, and they examine the networked infrastructure of cities such as transport, communication, energy, water, and street networks.
What I like about this book is that it helps readers to understand the complexity and the sociotechnical processes of modern cities by using urban network infrastructure and providing examples across scales from local to global examples. This book also shows us how to approach modern cities with an interdisciplinary approach by using social theories such as actor-network theory, political economy, and relational theories.
Splintering Urbanism makes an international and interdisciplinary analysis of the complex interactions between infrastructure networks and urban spaces. It delivers a new and powerful way of understanding contemporary urban change, bringing together discussions about: *globalization and the city *technology and society *urban space and urban networks *infrastructure and the built environment *developed, developing and post-communist worlds. With a range of case studies, illustrations and boxed examples, from New York to Jakarta, Johannesberg to Manila and Sao Paolo to Melbourne, Splintering Urbanism demonstrates the latest social, urban and technological theories, which give us an understanding of our contemporary metropolis.
As I watched abandoned buildings, homes, and factories spread throughout neighborhoods in Detroit while photographers came from everywhere to photograph the ruins, I became fascinated with why we are drawn to ruins, what role such imagery plays in our collective imagination, and how ruins today are different than, say, Greek ruins. I am also interested in the politics behind the ruins and the role of capitalism in creating our declining cities. I have written several books on visual culture and politics, engaging with issues of race, trauma, memory, war, and capitalist globalization.
Brenner blew my mind by explaining that the idea of the city as a circumscribed and autonomous space is an obsolete nineteenth-century concept. He made me realize that the boundaries between city, suburb, and rural space are superseded by capitalist urbanization and industrialization across the planet—under the oceans, across the land, and even in the atmosphere—and that it is utterly degrading the environment for purposes of commodification.
Urbanization is transforming the planet, within and beyond cities, at all spatial scales. In this book, Neil Brenner mobilizes the tools of critical urban theory to deconstruct some of the dominant urban discourses of our time, which naturalize, and thus depoliticize, the enclosures, exclusions, injustices and irrationalities of neoliberal urbanism. In so doing, Brenner advocates a constant reinvention of the framing categories, methods and assumptions of critical urban theory in relation to the rapidly mutating geographies of capitalist urbanization. Only a theory that is dynamic-which is constantly being transformed in relation to the restlessly evolving social worlds and territorial landscapes…
Journalism and history have been my dual obsessions since high school, and my work for the past 13 years has focused on the intersection between them. The pressures of journalism, its tremendous impact, and the extraordinary characters who tend to be drawn to the profession are endlessly fascinating to me. In my time as a PhD student, professor, researcher, and book review editor for an academic journal, I have read hundreds of books about American journalism and its past (maybe over 1,000 now that I think about it, but I haven’t kept count!). I’ve also reviewed several for the Washington Post. These are some of my favorites.
There are lots of books about the stories newspapers published, but there are not so many books about what newspapers meant to people—and to the cities whose names they bore.
This book, which examines the press in four major U.S. cities around the turn of the 20th century, shows how newspapers helped Americans understand who they were in a modernizing country. I love that it doesn’t focus only on weighty national affairs and politics. Instead, Guarneri shows the influence the press had on things like gender roles, suburban growth, and social class.
The images alone—news stories, illustrations, and advertisements from the period—make this book so much fun to flip through.
At the close of the nineteenth century, new printing and paper technologies fueled an expansion of the newspaper business and publishers were soon reeling off as many copies as Americans could be convinced to buy. Newspapers quickly saturated the United States, especially its cities, which were often home to more than a dozen daily papers apiece. Using New York, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Chicago as case studies, Julia Guarneri shows how city dailies became active agents in creating metropolitan spaces and distinctive urban cultures.Newsprint Metropolis offers a vivid tour of these papers, from the front to the back pages. Paying attention…
I started my career in tourism but soon discovered my passion for urban heritage. Working as a site manager for a world heritage site, I gathered extensive insights on various levels of heritage management and urban governance from many colleagues around the world. Today there is no single project or meeting that does not address the challenges of climate change. Obtaining my Ph.D. late in life, in Heritage-Based Urban Development, I quicklybecame convinced that the traditional ideas of what cultural heritage is do not reflect the situation today and hinder giving cultural heritage a role in climate change prevention and adaption, beyond the narrative that it has to be preserved.
The key contribution of this book was the systemic understanding of cultural heritage. The collected articles and case studies represent a holistic and integrated concept of cultural heritage. Seeing cultural heritage as a social and political construct, as the authors describe it, opened the door for two new approaches:
First, the integration of different types of heritage that are usually treated separately, e.g., intangible heritage, tangible heritage, etc. And, second, starting to focus on the social parts of cultural heritage, basically the role of people. In my personal view all heritage is only relevant if it is relevant to people, and this book helped me to shape this conviction.
I truly admire how the author connects the different government levels and doesn't shy away from the obvious complexity this brings forward. This big-picture approach is a refreshing alternative to many case-focused articles and books and naturally speaks to my…
More than half of the world's population now live in urban areas, and cities provide the setting for contemporary challenges such as population growth, mass tourism and unequal access to socio-economic opportunities. Urban Heritage, Development and Sustainability examines the impact of these issues on urban heritage, considering innovative approaches to managing developmental pressures and focusing on how taking an ethical, inclusive and holistic approach to urban planning and heritage conservation may create a stronger basis for the sustainable growth of cities in the future.
This volume is a timely analysis of current theories and practises in urban heritage, with particular…
I’m a historian of the senses. When I first traveled to the United States, I was fascinated and overwhelmed by the smell and sound of the streets entirely different from my hometown in Japan. Since then, every time I go abroad, I enjoy various sensory experiences in each country. The first thing I always notice is the smell of the airport which is different from country to country. We all have the senses, but we sense things differently—and these differences are cultural. I wondered if they are also historical. That was the beginning of my inquiry into how our sensory experience has been constructed and changed over time.
Kiechle’s Smell Detectiveshows how smell, the mute sense, has been in fact quite “talkative.” By going back to the nineteenth-century United States, the book discusses how cities back then smelled and how people living there reacted to it. Olfaction is actually a critical source of knowledge. Smell can tell you a lot about your surrounding environment and other people. It also gives historians clues to understand how people lived in the past. Moreover, smell, like other senses, is not a simply subjective, biological phenomenon. Sensations we experience change over time—imagine smell and sounds on the street today and hundred years ago. It is also cultural and political, too. How people understand certain sensations is a historical product—a certain “bad” small was racialized and associated with a lower class, for example. This book is an excellent way to “sniff” out the history of the senses.
What did nineteenth-century cities smell like? And how did odors matter in the formation of a modern environmental consciousness? Smell Detectives follows the nineteenth-century Americans who used their noses to make sense of the sanitary challenges caused by rapid urban and industrial growth. Melanie Kiechle examines nuisance complaints, medical writings, domestic advice, and myriad discussions of what constituted fresh air, and argues that nineteenth-century city dwellers, anxious about the air they breathed, attempted to create healthier cities by detecting and then mitigating the most menacing odors.
Medical theories in the nineteenth century assumed that foul odors caused disease and that…
I am an historian and archaeologist of the Roman world, who has lectured on the subject around the world. This summer I am moving from a position in London to one in Los Angeles. One of the attractions of Roman history is that it is a vast subject spanning three continents and more than a thousand years. There is always something new to discover and a great international community of researchers working together to do just that. It is a huge privilege to be part of that community and to try and communicate some its work to the widest audience possible.
The monuments we see when we visit Rome were constructed under the emperors. But Rome was already a great metropolis before they began work, one that was architecturally unique and built on a scale to dwarf most ancient cities. What this book does is reconstruct the great building projects of the Republic, beginning with the original fourth-century walls of Rome and the first aqueducts. It asks (and answers) questions like: Where did they get the stone? Who provided the labour? How long did it take them? And what technologies did they use? This was a Rome built without marble, without concrete, and not a royal foundation, but one managed by generations of magistrates riding the wave of a slow economic boom. Completely fascinating.
Building Mid-Republican Rome offers a holistic treatment of the development of the Mid-Republican city from 396 to 168 BCE. As Romans established imperial control over Italy and beyond, the city itself radically transformed from an ambitious central Italian settlement into the capital of the Mediterranean world. Seth Bernard describes this transformation in terms of both new urban architecture, much of it unprecedented in form and extent, and new socioeconomic structures, including slavery, coinage, and market-exchange. These physical and historical developments were closely linked: building the Republican city was expensive, and meeting such costs had significant implications for urban society. Building…
