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Beryl Satter

Born: 1959 in Chicago, Illinois
Pen Name: None

Connection to Illinois: She was raised in Chicago, Skokie, and Evanston, Illinois, and currently lives in New York City.

Biography: Beryl Satter is Professor of History at Rutgers University-Newark, where she teaches courses on U.S. history, urban history, and women’s history. She has an M.A. degree from Harvard Divinity School and received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1992. Her book Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America won the 2009 National Jewish Book Award in History, the 2010 Liberty Legacy Award from the Organization of American Historians, and an Honorable Mention from the 2010 Lukas Book Prize committee. It is her second book.


Awards:
  • -- 2009 National Jewish Book Award in History, ''Family Properties''

Primary Literary Genre(s): History; Non-Fiction

Primary Audience(s): Adult readers

Email: satter@andromeda.rutgers.edu
Website: http://www.ncas.rutgers.edu/beryl-satter
Beryl Satter on WorldCat : http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=beryl++satter


Selected Titles

Each mind a kingdom :
ISBN: 0520217659 OCLC: 39654723

University of California Press, Berkeley : ©1999.

"Each Mind a Kingdom offers the first in-depth history of the enormously popular turn-of-the-century New Thought movement. Most historians have characterized New Thought as the popular ideology of twentieth-century capitalism, but this account reanimates the movement's complex early history." "This revisionist history demonstrates the centrality of New Thought to the social and political transformations that reshaped American culture at the turn of the century. It explains how a spiritual discourse that combined rigid Victorian gender norms, middle-class reformism, race ideology, and proto-psychology gave rise to wildly popular twentieth-century cults of success. In so doing, it suggests new ways of interpreting the self-help, New Age movements of our own fin de siecle."--Jacket.

Each mind a kingdom :
ISBN: 0520229274 OCLC: 47722217

University of California Press, Berkeley : [2001], ©1999.

Family properties :
ISBN: 080507676x OCLC: 237018885

Metropolitan Books, New York : 2009.

Part family story and part urban history, this work is a landmark investigation of segregation and urban decay in Chicago, and in cities across the nation. The "promised land" for thousands of Southern blacks, postwar Chicago quickly became the most segregated city in the North, the site of the nation's worst ghettos and the target of Martin Luther King Jr.'s first campaign beyond the South. In this book, the author identifies the true causes of the city's black slums and the ruin of urban neighborhoods throughout the country. It is not, as some have argued, black pathology, the culture of poverty, or white flight, but a widespread and institutionalized system of legal and financial exploitation. This is an account of a city in crisis; unscrupulous lawyers, slumlords, and speculators are pitched against religious reformers, community organizers, and an impassioned attorney who launched a crusade against the profiteers, the author's father, Mark J. Satter. At the heart of the struggle stand the black migrants who, having left the South with its legacy of sharecropping, suddenly find themselves caught in a new kind of debt peonage. The author shows the interlocking forces at work in their oppression: the discriminatory practices of the banking industry; the federal policies that created the country's shameful "dual housing market" ; the economic anxieties that fueled white violence; and the tempting profits to be made by preying on the city's most vulnerable population. This tale of racism and real estate, politics and finance, will forever change our understanding of the forces that transformed urban America.--[Provided by publisher.].

 

 

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