In fact, the suburb was a twofer, fantasy-wise. Loathing cities had always been a defining American impulse, but as cities rapidly filled up with millions of black and Catholic and Jewish and otherwise not-quite-white immigrants, a lot of native-born people found cities even more loathsome. So in addition to nostalgia for the undefiled green republic, suburbs could also satisfy white people’s nostalgia for a time when they lived almost exclusively among other white (and Christian, preferably Protestant) people. Just as Americans in the 1600s and 1700s left towns where they found the dominant
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