At his fifth birthday party, Penn historian Thomas Sugrue was treated to a sight that would delight just about any little boy: trucks and soldiers. The Sugrue's home was situated along a main artery in northwest Detroit. National Guardsmen and federal troops were on their way downtown to help local law enforcement officers suppress the city's 1967 riot. In five days of violence, looting, and arson, 43 people died and more than 2,500 buildings were looted and burned. The five year old boy grew up to chronicle the combined effects of racial discrimination and deindustrialization that led to the riot in Detroit. Much of the damage is still visible today, and the conditions generated by the troubled past that Sugrue narrates are still unresolved in almost every major American city.

History, as Sugrue tells it, is the story hidden within stacks of rotting newspapers and letters, reams of data and statistics, government documents, memoirs, maps, studies, reports, and organizational records. Historians, he says, are lovers of stories. "We believe in the power of narrative." The historian sorts through records and archives, and pieces together a narrative of what happened–a story often invisible even to those who lived it.

Historians like Sugrue resemble soothsayers in reverse: instead of prognostication, they practice the magic art of "postnostication." Instead of spells and incantations to reveal the future, the historian's sorcery employs scholarship to conjure up the invisible past. "Most of Detroit's violent past remains hidden from history," he writes. Sugrue sets out to uncover this invisible history and uses a storyteller's compelling magic to make it appear before readers' eyes.

Tom Sugrue specializes in urban history, having earned a doctorate from Harvard. He also studied British history at Cambridge. Although an associate professor of history and sociology at Penn, his demeanor is more boyish than professorial. Wide-rimmed glasses rest beneath a high forehead and hair that is trimmed and altar-boy neat. A chair seems to be among the most uncomfortable of places for him. Shifting from one position to another while he speaks–crossing and uncrossing and recrossing his legs, shaking a dangling foot to and fro, or pumping a leg up and down–Sugrue squirms like a boy in a church pew.

His efforts to understand urban poverty and the fate of America's cities began in the late 80s and culminated in the publication of The Origins of the Urban Crisis in 1996. The book tells the story of "the interconnected forces of race, residence, discrimination, and industrial decline," all of which interacted in significant ways to reshape the nation in the period following the Second World War. It weaves together stories of individual actions, employer and real estate practices, federal policy and local politics, the neighborhood activities of homeowner's associations and accounts of shopfloor culture–all intertwined with the momentum of ineluctable and impersonal forces that converged on Detroit. "The more I dug into archival sources, the more I realized the story of urban poverty is much more complicated than the conventional wisdom had led us to believe."

Sugrue points out that periods like the 1950s and the 60s are laden with clichés. The 50s, for instance, are commonly thought of as the period of consensus, prosperity, and homogeneity. Sugrue's research discloses that the Ozzie and Harriet decade was not just more complicated than that, but profoundly troubled–and troubling. Jobs were hemorrhaging from cities, and attacks on blacks who tried to move into white neighborhoods were common. From the end of the Second World War to the beginning of the 1960s, Sugrue documented over 200 instances of white-on-black hostility in Detroit, ranging from window breaking to arson to physical violence. Typically, the attacks involved not just male homeowners but their children and wives–often carried out under the eyes of non-intervening police. Because these recurring incidents went unreported in the mainstream press, this aspect of modern life is almost completely absent from most people's historical consciousness. It is invisible.

"In the 1950s, economists and sociologists were enamored of America's prosperity. The country was going through an amazing period of growth; we were the richest country in the world. But there were many, many islands: places left behind by aggregate economic growth, and increasingly cities and areas with large minority populations became those places. The rhetoric of growth and prosperity blinded many observers and rendered the deeply entrenched unemployment, underemployment, and poverty in large sections of the United States invisible to many." In the affluent society, the increasing economic hardship of those left jobless by the "unheralded" restructuring of America's manufacturing industries became invisible.

Detroit, which went from America's "arsenal of democracy" to one of its Rust Belt capitals in just a quarter century, is one of the places that was left behind. The empty shells of huge factories, rows of boarded-up shops and stores, over ten thousand abandoned houses, and over sixty thousand empty lots scar modern Detroit with wasteland sections that are "eerily apocalyptic." More than one-third of the city's residents live below the poverty line, most in neighborhoods where virtually everyone is poor and black. Increasingly, these individuals have little involvement with the mainstream economy and are often outside the labor market altogether.

"Race and class are fundamentally intertwined," Sugrue argues. Capitalism, a competitive system, by its nature generates economic inequality, and African Americans disproportionately suffer the impact of an unequal distribution of power and resources. "We can't look at problems of race in the United States and not look at problems of class and at issues of economic inequality–which is a taboo subject." For many, he asserts, the American Dream, the idea of untrammeled opportunity, has little more substance than a dream.

Sugrue observes that the parameters of economic and political debate, particularly regarding the changes that shook rusting cities like Detroit, were set by anti-Communist ideology and the orthodoxy of neoclassical economics. Serious and powerful critics of the postwar economic and social order, those whose assumptions lay outside the boundaries of acceptable public discourse, were simply not heard. "The result," he writes, "is that urban economic decline in the postwar years has remained largely absent from historical accounts of the 1940s and 1950s."

According to Sugrue, a good deal of federal and state policy intended to alleviate urban decline is based on "bad history." Those involved in reform of the welfare system, for instance, argue that 60s initiatives like the Great Society and the War on Poverty unleashed social forces that encouraged dependency and family breakdown. Sugrue shows that the historic trends leading to postindustrial poverty–the unprecedented segregation and isolation of the poor, both inside the ghetto and outside the mainstream economy–were already underway in the 1940s. "Underlying so much of the public policy debate about cities and about poverty," he says, "are simplistic and unexamined historical assumptions. We really need to see that questions of economic inequality are at the very heart of modern American history. They're absolutely fundamental–and they have fundamental implications for public policy."

Without the proper historical perspective, policy makers are like sorcerer's apprentices: incapable of directing the formidable powers and forces summoned up by modern society–powers that threaten to devour it. In Sugrue's cramped office, a Yellow Cab taxi light sits on the sill of a high window beside an enlarged reproduction of the cover from his acclaimed book–a dark metallic sepia depicting a night time vignette of Detroit burning. "It is only through the complex and interwoven histories of race, residence, and work in the postwar era," he writes, "that the state of today's cities and their impoverished residents can be fully understood and confronted."

In his book, Sugrue tells the story of long-term racial discrimination in the Motor City's housing and employment practices. Early in the century, millions of African Americans began to migrate to the North's urban centers, driven from the rural South by Jim Crow and lured north by the promise of opportunity offered by thriving industries. Between 1940 and 1950, the city's black population doubled. In the automobile industry, blacks became a substantial part of the workforce, although they were consigned to the "meanest and dirtiest jobs." As automation and the relocation of plants took hold–abetted by federal policy that encouraged corporations to relocate to suburbs and to the Sun Belt–Detroit's manufacturing base collapsed. The East Side alone lost ten plants and over 70,000 jobs between 1953 and 1960. Between 1949 and 1960, the city was shaken by four major recessions. "African American workers bore the brunt of economic change," writes Sugrue, "their options limited by discrimination, and their tenuous hold on factory jobs threatened by deindustrialization."

Racism, notes Sugrue, is not simply a value or attitude: a derogatory belief about another race that predisposes someone to use racist epithets and to discriminate. "Racism is the existence of structures like divided labor markets: what jobs are 'white' jobs and what jobs are 'black' jobs. That racial division becomes institutionalized; it takes on a structure that doesn't respond quickly to changes in attitudes or beliefs." Not only did African Americans suffer disproportionally from economic restructuring, but because housing discrimination blocked access to employment in the burgeoning suburbs, most became trapped by "invisible barriers of race" in overcrowded and decaying urban ghettos.

Sugrue explores how racial discrimination in housing–real estate practices, the assertion of whites' homeowners "rights," and even federal policy–contributed to the urban crisis. Isolated in the city's worst housing, Detroit's African Americans confronted virtually insurmountable barriers in the housing market and were systematically shut out of the private real estate market. Already poor with the lowest-paying jobs, they not only had to pay more for substandard housing, blacks could not get loans for repair, maintenance, and rehabilitation of their homes.

Powerful structural elements inform whites' attitudes toward blacks, notes Sugrue. "There was a whole mythology surrounding African Americans' values and behaviors that led whites to flee when blacks began moving into ‘their' neighborhoods." A common bit of conventional wisdom was, "They don't keep up their properties." Behind this belief was the combined effect of low wages, lack of access to loans, and relegation to aging and deteriorating houses that made it almost impossible for blacks to have neighborhoods comparable to the newly constructed white developments on the city's outskirts. Whites look at black neighborhoods and see their beliefs about race confirmed, not understanding that behind the crumbling facade of a 75 year old house is a whole structure of race-based economic impoverishment and lack of investment. "They don't know that part of the story," Sugrue says, "that is the invisible part. The visible part is a black face in front of a crumbling house. Racial beliefs are reinforced by a reality that begins as a consequence of racial prejudice but then takes on a life of its own. It becomes institutionalized, and it becomes a rationalization for whites to continue moving away from neighborhoods that blacks move into. It becomes a rationalization for drawing those invisible boundaries between white and black neighborhoods."

Detroit, wrote an astute New York Times journalist, had become America's "first major third world city": a largely black and very poor city ringed by affluent, mostly white suburbs. "The architects of Jim Crow would have been pleased at the pattern of racial segregation in American cities," declares Sugrue. "In terms of where people live, there's virtually complete racial segregation. The racially discriminatory outcome is a consequence of the interaction of several structural forces: that's the story I'm telling–how patterns of racial inequality have been built into American political institutions and into the American economy."

The mounting crisis that Sugrue documents so well is not confined to Detroit. "If I had chosen another city," he offers, "I could have written largely the same book."