Rather than go along the road that many Urban History Association presidential addresses have followed in giving an assessment of the state of the field, I am convinced that the state of the field will undoubtedly be secure, at least until the next presidential talk. Instead, I would like to emulate the presidential talk of Liz Cohen and discuss my own field. I do so not only because it is mine, but because I would like to make it yours as well. The World War II homefront is preeminently an urban story, which I would hope to persuade some of you to enhance. With some honorable exceptions, like the work of Jack Baumann and Kristin Sylvian on housing, that of Thomas Sugrue and Heather Thompson on white flight, Arnold Hirsch and Josh Sides on race, Laura McEnaney on demobilization, and Sarah Jo Peterson on politics and planning, urban historians have not taken to the Second World War urban homefront story. Their stories end before the war and resume after the war, but mostly leave open the period in between. The Second World War urban homefront was something that came after the Great Depression, the New Deal, the FHA, and the first national housing initiatives. And the urban war comes before white flight, Leavitt and Company, shopping malls, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, and urban renewal. That hiatus is doubly puzzling because military, political, and diplomatic historians seem to think that ending the career of Hitler and limiting that of Stalin was not such a bad idea, perhaps even a terrifically good one. Other historians tell us that the war ended the Depression, proved that a modern bureaucratic state could manage a modern bureaucratic economy, laid the foundation for the delightfully misnamed military-industrial complex, set the foundation for both civil rights and women's rights, triggered white flight, pumped up the union movement, and benefited big business at the expense of small. Many western historians still believe that the war was the turning 171
