The politics and economics of homeownership are central to understanding race and inequality in modern American history. Drawing from his sweeping new project on the history of real estate, race, and capital in modern America, Sugrue explores the history of one of the most important places in the history of American city planning, a modest Cleveland suburb made famous in the landmark Supreme Court case Euclid v. Ambler (1926), infamous as ground zero of the mortgage and foreclosure crisis nine decades later.

Thomas J. Sugrue is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University and Director NYU’s American Studies Program and also the NYU Collaborative on Global Urbanism. He is author of four books, including The Origins of the Urban Crisis (1996) which won the Bancroft Prize in History; and Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (2008), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History.