Beginning in the 1850s, American case and statute law established alcohol policies that applied specifically to women, which aimed broadly to promote temperance among both sexes. These measures reflected the powerful hold of a middle-class Victorian ideology that stigmatized female drinking, associated women with temperance, and kept women legally dependent in general. American laws on women and alcohol fell into two broad categories. The first was access laws, which restricted women's ability to purchase alcohol, patronize liquor outlets and work in the alcohol trade. These measures aimed to protect women from becoming drunkards, and depleted their legal power. The second group was domestic laws, including marriage, divorce and civil liability statutes. They aimed to protect women from drunken family members, especially husbands, and actually bestowed legal authority on women. Although both sets of laws promoted temperance, they did so both by expanding and contracting women's legal influence. These measures survived until the 1970s, when a series of court decisions overturned them on the basis of sex discrimination. The evolution of these laws shows how middle-class attitudes about female drinking were codified into sex-specific alcohol policy for most of the nation's history.

Mass migration to suburban areas was a defining feature of American life after 1945. Before World War II, just 13% of Americans lived in suburbs. By 2010, however, suburbia was home to more than half of the U.S. population. The nation’s economy, politics, and society suburbanized in important ways. Suburbia shaped habits of car dependency and commuting, patterns of spending and saving, and experiences with issues as diverse as race and taxes, energy and nature, privacy and community. The owner occupied, single-family home, surrounded by a yard, and set in a neighborhood outside the urban core came to define everyday experience for most American households, and in the world of popular culture and the imagination, suburbia was the setting for the American dream. The nation’s suburbs were an equally critical economic landscape, home to vital high-tech industries, retailing, “logistics,” and office employment. In addition, American politics rested on a suburban majority, and over several decades, suburbia incubated political movements across the partisan spectrum, from grass-roots conservativism, to centrist meritocratic individualism, environmentalism, feminism, and social justice. In short, suburbia was a key setting for postwar American life. Even as suburbia grew in magnitude and influence, it also grew more diverse, coming to reflect a much broader cross-section of America itself. This encompassing shift marked two key chronological stages in suburban history since 1945: the expansive, racialized, mass suburbanization of the postwar years (1945–1970) and an era of intensive social diversification and metropolitan complexity (since 1970). In the first period, suburbia witnessed the expansion of segregated white privilege, bolstered by government policies, exclusionary practices, and reinforced by grassroots political movements. By the second period, suburbia came to house a broader cross section of Americans, who brought with them a wide range of outlooks, lifeways, values, and politics. Suburbia became home to large numbers of immigrants, ethnic groups, African Americans, the poor, the elderly and diverse family types. In the face of stubborn exclusionism by affluent suburbs, inequality persisted across metropolitan areas and manifested anew in proliferating poorer, distressed suburbs. Reform efforts sought to alleviate metro-wide inequality and promote sustainable development, using coordinated regional approaches. In recent years, the twin discourses of suburban crisis and suburban rejuvenation captured the continued complexity of America’s suburbs.

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In interwar Los Angeles, the politics of the neighborhood took on immense importance in the lives of white, working-class families. A close study of South Gate, a blue-collar suburb in southern Los Angeles, reveals that home ownership became central to the political identity of local residents. In these years, the peculiar nature of working-class suburbia lent a highly class-sensitive spin to that identity; working-class homeowners were fiercely concerned with protecting the modest economic security that home ownership gave them, particularly in the precarious years before the welfare state. South Gate’s native-born, white residents embraced the tenets of “plain folk Americanism,” which valued self-help, hard work, and individualism. Accordingly, they drew on sweat equity to build their own homes and grow food on their property, as a means of achieving some independence from cash wages. When local merchants sought to raise taxes, to finance their broader goal of developing the suburb’s infrastructure as a means of stimulating local business, working-class families mobilized politically to resist. Local politics became a series of battles between South Gate’s merchants and working-class residents, focused on taxation and development. These struggles reveal how workers ascribed their own class-based meanings to home ownership, and how they asserted their class interests in the arena of neighborhood politics.

Ethnic suburban settlement has shaped suburban landscapes in contrasting ways. On one end are ethnoburbs, where ethnic groups used spatial politics to assert their rights of ethnic expression in the landscape. On the other-less noticed-end are places where ethnic settlers arrived en masse, and their presence was scarcely visible. This article focuses on the latter, towns where ethnic suburbanites consented to existing design mores-what we term design assimilation. Using case studies from Asian American suburbs of the west and east San Gabriel Valley, we explore the history of places where Anglo design aesthetics persisted in the midst of profound demographic change. Multiple factors created and protected these landscapes, including stringent regulatory cultures of these suburbs, white political action, accommodations by builders, and Asian American consent. Asian suburbanites supported these landscapes for aesthetic, nostalgic, political, and economic reasons, including the belief that American landscape aesthetics conveyed a social distinction that positioned them above those around them-including other Asians in the ethnoburbs. Our work shows how suburban advantage has been reinforced by new waves of immigrant suburbanites, in ways that reflect the inequities and spatial expression of globalization itself. This work offers a new perspective on immigrant suburbanization and its interface with suburban "landscapes of privilege."What happens when places with long-standing design traditions confront radical social transformation? This is a phenomenon unfolding over broad swaths of our metropolitan areas, and it is especially striking in suburbs receiving large numbers of immigrants. The San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles offers a vivid example. As a prime destination of Asian immigration, the suburban 1 Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West,