Forthcoming

The leadup to the presidential election of 1860 found America bitterly divided, as the dominant Democratic Party broke up over the intense pressure of slavery, and the six-year-old Republican Party sought a leader who could win. The story of the convention to name the Republican Party’s candidate – eight days that led to Abraham Lincoln’s nomination – makes clear that Lincoln’s extraordinary quest to lead the party might have collapsed, with fatal consequences for the United States of America.

The convention was held in Chicago, although Lincoln himself waited for news from Springfield, far from the heavy drinking, humor, jealousy, political animosities, and angling for power that were the stuff of political life of the times. The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention That Changed History plunges the reader right into the convention, to experience the sights, sounds and smells of Chicago in 1860. The tension-filled maneuvering of the political players and the candidates’ managers echo the forces buffeting the nation — particularly over slavery and Lincoln’s vision for ending it.

With its secretive and sordid horse-trading, the convention allows us to see Lincoln’s strengths as a political strategist. His plan played out perfectly against long odds, thanks to the hard work of friends whose extraordinary loyalty he had the gift of cultivating. The Lincoln Miracle opens a window on the tremendous political forces tearing America apart as it lurched toward the bloody and catastrophic Civil War.

Although the entrenched racial discrimination in the housing market that Richard Rothstein chronicled in The Color of Law has been declining over the past several decades, one of America’s most enduring systems of housing inequity – economic segregation—largely goes unremarked. From coast to coast, cities—many of them liberal bastions—have imposed laws and regulations that have locked inequality into the urban landscape.

In Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYISM and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See, Richard Kahlenberg calls for us to pay attention to the myriad ways in which government has promoted economic segregation—most of it affecting people of color in urban settings. By implementing laws that ban the construction of less expensive and denser apartment buildings and other multifamily units like duplexes and triplexes, and by setting aside land that is restricted to single family dwellings, housing choice has been socially engineered to the benefit of the affluent.

Economic segregation matters. Where you live affects so much—your access to transportation, employment opportunities, decent health care, and good schools. Yet NIMBYism has meant that even the most moderate plans for building more housing have faced opposition. In response, The Walls We Don’t See proposes a new “economic fair housing act” to prohibit or discourage laws and practices that bar access to entire neighborhoods.

Rick also chronicles how, in cities like Minneapolis, things are beginning to shift. Writing in the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo has ventured to hope that support for different housing practices might be growing. Partly in response to the housing crisis revealed by the pandemic, he suggested that “a pragmatic, humane and rational view toward housing, homelessness, inequality and other pressing urban problems may be dawning.”

In Excluded, Rick Kahlenberg brings economic segregation to light and in so doing offers a view of how things can and must change.

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