Race, Ethnicity and Urbanization: Selected Essays [Book Review]

These 15 papers, all except the introduction already published over the past two decades in scholarly journals or essay collections, examine other historians' works, review and reconceptualize scholarship or urbanization, immigration, and southern Jewry, and - repetitiously - elaborate the evidence for Rabinowitz's well-known contention that the dominant trend in post-Civil War, southern, urban, race relations was the substitution of segregation for the exclusion of blacks from public services and accommodations. Written with Rabinowitz's customary style, wit and verve, painstakingly researched, regularly insightful, and always commonsensical, the essays reveal a masterful, but rather conventional historian (a self-described 'throwback'. p.15) at his best. They thereby underline, even more strongly than would the products of lesser hands, the limitations of conventional history.