"Most men have local attachment so strong," wrote the author of a Massachusetts town history published in 1847, "that it invests some spot, endeared by association, with controlling interest." In the seventy years that followed this observation, the United States was transformed from a rural society of small communities into an urban nation where most people lived in cities.

Surprisingly, writes Alexander von Hoffman, this transformation did not destroy "local attachments" and create an impersonal, atomized society. Instead, these attachments flourished in the fundamental unit of urban society, the city neighborhood.

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In Local Attachments von Hoffman explores the emergence of the modern urban neighborhood in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by examining Boston's outer-city neighborhood, Jamaica Plain. Like other American urban neighborhoods of the era, Jamaica Plain experienced the arrival of many ethnic groups, a house-building boom for members of every social class, and the creation of commercial, industrial, and recreational areas within its boundaries.

Despite this diversity, a vital neighborhood culture bound the residents of the neighborhood together. Businesses, churches, schools, clubs, charitable societies, and political organizations spun a web of social ties that fostered a powerful sense of allegiance to the local community. Yet in the end, political reformers and twentieth-century mores shattered the unity of the turn-of-the-century neighborhood and contributed to a decline in the quality of urban life.

1. Drawn from a wealth of primary sources and illustrated with more than fifty photographs and maps, Local Attachments offers a detailed look, from the inside out, of the evolution of urban America.