The Ghetto in Global History

By Wendy Z. Goldman and Joe William Trotter, Jr.

The Department of History and the Center for Africanamericcan Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE) are proud to announce the publication of The Ghetto in Global History: 1500 to the Present (New York/London: Routledge, 2018).  Edited by Wendy Z. Goldman and Joe William Trotter, Jr., The Ghetto in Global History is a product of an interdisciplinary A. W. Mellon Foundation funded Sawyer Seminar on the ghetto that we conducted at Carnegie Mellon University during academic year, 2014-15. The seminar attracted participants from departments across the College of Humanities and Social Sciences as well scholars from the University of Pittsburgh, West Virginia University, and other regional colleges and universities. Invited scholars from Germany, Israel, and Africa as well as the United States presented their work using approaches and methodologies from the historical to the digital to the anthropological. The current volume of essays focuses on four case studies of the ghetto in various times and places: the early modern Jewish ghetto, Nazi ghettos, African American ghettos, and South African townships. It contains seventeen essays by new and recognized scholars. In a substantive introduction, the editors trace the transnational circulation of the ghetto over time as a concept, policy, and lived experience. Beginning with the origin of the ghetto in Venice in 1516, the book maps the transnational circulation of the ghetto from Europe to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the dissemination of the idea into colonial practices in South Africa and Nazi Germany. The volume’s conclusion examines the debates and common themes that emerge from the collected essays, including community building, permeability, resistance, and internal class divisions, to name a few. The book also engages issues raised by a variety of other recent groundbreaking transnational studies on the subject, including most notably Mitchell Duneier’s Ghetto. The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (2016) and Carl Nightingale’s Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (2012).

The Sawyer Seminar