Stephen Robert ’62 Hall, 280 Brook Street, Providence, RI
Date: Tuesday, April 30, 2024
Time: 4:30pm - 5:30pm EDT
Format: Hybrid
Location: Stephen Robert ’62 Hall, 280 Brook Street, Room 101, Providence, RI 02912 and online via live webstream. Reception and book sale to follow for those who join in person.
As in many American metropolitan areas, inequality in Chicagoland is visible in its neighborhoods. These inequalities are not inevitable, however. They have been constructed and deepened by public policies around housing, schooling, taxation, and local governance, including hidden state government policies.
In Structuring Inequality, historian Tracy L. Steffes shows how metropolitan inequality in Chicagoland was structured, contested, and naturalized over time even as reformers tried to change it through school desegregation, affordable housing, and property tax reform. While these efforts had modest successes in the city and the suburbs, reformers faced significant resistance and counter-mobilization from affluent suburbanites, real estate developers, and other defenders of the status quo who defended inequality and reshaped the policy conversation about it. Grounded in comprehensive archival research and policy analysis, Structuring Inequality examines the history of Chicagoland’s established systems of inequality and provides perspective on the inequality we live with today.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tracy L. Steffes is an Associate Professor of Education and History at Brown University. Her primary research and teaching interests are twentieth-century United States history, the history of American education, and political and policy history. She is the author of “Structuring Inequality: How Schooling, Housing, and Tax Policies Shaped Metropolitan Development and Education” (University of Chicago Press, 2024) and “School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890-1940” (University of Chicago Press, 2012).