Articles

Jane Jacobs is a major figure in urbanism. Her books are milestones of the discipline. As she lived her long life she never stopped expanding her research and honing her analysis of how cities work, notably embracing debates about the environment when they were still only emergent. Jacobs is generally considered a visionary and – by those who knew her from the barricades – a fighter, obstinate in her defence of cities from the onslaught of a legion of developers. Her duels in the mid-twentieth century with New York City’s master planner, Robert Moses, are the stuff of urban legend.

 On July 20, 2016, the day after
 Donald Trump accepted the presidential nomination of the party whose origins Eric Foner chronicled in his first book, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1970), I met with the distinguished historian, professor, and longtime Nation board member in his office at Columbia University. A longer version of this interview appears in Foner’s new book, Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History.