As an exciting keynote to our final Historic Resources Committee meeting in 2020, we welcome prizewinning historian Lizabeth Cohen, Ph.D., who will discuss her recent book Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age. Dr. Cohen will revisit the history of urban renewal in the second half of the twentieth century by following the long career of Edward J. Logue, who worked to revitalize New Haven in the 1950s, became the architect of the “New Boston” in the 1960s, and later led innovative redevelopment efforts in New York at the state level and in the South Bronx. Urban Renewal is often dismissed as a failure – for good reason – but Dr. Cohen aims to uncover a more balanced picture that acknowledges not only its shortcomings but also some of its progressive goals and noteworthy achievements. Logue worked closely with architects and planners during his career, many of them important modernists who with federal support for urban renewal focused their attention on subsidized housing and other kinds of urban revitalization.
Lizabeth Cohen is the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies and a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of History at Harvard University. From 2011-18, she was Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Her previous books include A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America and Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. She has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Historians. Dr. Cohen’s books are available through Amazon and many other sources.