COMMUNITY AND CULTURE

Forest Park, a suburb near Cincinnati, was developed on land originally assembled for Greenhills, a Greenbelt town built under the auspices of the New Deal Resettlement Administration. But it was not until the 1950s, after the northern and as yet unbuilt section of Greenhills was transferred to a private developer, that community-building got under way. While able to trace its origins to one of the most visionary of New Deal programs, Forest Park in fact a postwar privately-planned suburb. Most of our understanding of such suburbs comes either from personal experience or from the participant-observation of sociologists. One thinks first, perhaps, of Herbert Gans's fine study, Levittowners (1967), or of Bennett Berger's Working Class Suburb (1960), or, particularly in this case, since the name of Forest Park was a conscious reference to Park Forest, the Chicago suburb studied by William H. White in Organization Man (1957). In Suburb, Zane Miller provides us with the first important study of a contemporary suburb by a professional historian. Suburb written for two audiences. For the people of Forest Park, who initially commissioned the book, Miller provides a thoroughly researched and well-documented narrative of the development of the suburb, emphasizing city planning and politics. For Miller's professional colleagues (that is, us), Forest Park a vehicle for developing what he calls symptomatic history. intellectual strategy it describes brings Miller to some rather fundamental concerns in the writing of history. Unlike Sam Bass Warner, who has argued that in American cities the profoundly evident in the present,' Miller insists on a radically historical posture toward the The past, he observes, is really past. He doubts that past ideas and forces have shaped the present. Instead he describes the as a series of discrete and discontinuous (p. xiv). analytical task of the historian, for Miller, to distinguish these divisions by describing a succession of taxonomic periods (p. xvii). Each of these portrays