BOOKS

The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945

Oxford University Press, January 2024

This book explore life on the ground in the suburbs of Los Angeles from 1945 to the present day, an era of extraordinary transformation in America's suburban communities.  Especially in this global metropolis, the suburbs flipped from being lily-white to diverse in many ways, as immigrants, the poor, all ethnic and racial groups, and of course whites and the affluent made homes in suburbia.  This book explores how social and civic life evolved in this roiling context -- and with what consequences for metropolitan equity.  The project has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, the Huntington Library and the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. 

The Suburb Reader, 1st &2nd editions

Co-edited with Andrew Wiese, Routledge, 2006, 2016

​The Suburb Reader documents the rise of North American suburbanization from the 1700s to today.  It explores suburbia's rise from many angles:  design, economics, gender, popular culture, race, politics, sustainability, the environment, social justice, and planning.  From William Levitt to Ralph Waldo Emerson to Curious George, The Suburb Reader presents a lively cast of characters who've helped build suburbia and establish its hold on the American imagination.  The book has over 200 primary sources, illustrations, and critical essays.  
* Named a top ten book of 2007 by PLANetizen.com
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My Blue Heaven

University of Chicago Press, 2002

"Becky M. Nicolaides's magnificent book ... demonstrates that white working-class suburban values, cultivated over nearly half a century of community building, played as important a role in the urban crisis as the more common explanations of destructive federal policy and elite suburban exclusivity.”
-- Nicolas Bloom, American Historical Review

“Becky Nicolaides’s pathbreaking study, My Blue Heaven,...provides fine insight into the dynamics of a white working-class suburb’s transformation from a community of poor families ... to the racialized and defensive community of middle-class, blue-collar workers in the 1950s and 1960s.”
-- James Borchert, Pacific Historical Review

* 2004 AHA-PCB  Book Award
* 2004 Donald Pleuger Award, Historical Society of Southern California
* 2003 finalist, W. Turrentine Jackson Award, Western History Association


SELECT ARTICLES & BLOGS
“Suburban Disequilibrium” 
with Andrew Wiese
New York Times, Sunday Opinion section, April 7, 2013.

"Today’s suburbs provide a map not just to the different worlds of the rich and the poor, which have always been with us, but to the increase in inequality between economic and social classes."
“Map Room:  Stay-at-Home Moms in Los Angeles County, 1950-2000” 
California History, vol. 93, no. 3 (Fall 2016), 2-8.  With with maps by Jennifer Mapes.

"After 1970, the picture shifted dramatically. The richest and the poorest towns now had the highest proportion of stay-at-home moms, creating an unexpected common ground in the everyday life of these radically polarized towns."

"The day the cops accosted my 13-year-old son for walking his neighborhood"
SuburbanMe blog (2015)

"The route to the library is along a pretty busy street where drivers typically speed.  And there’s one major intersection to cross...He’s a bright kid, very responsible. About an hour after he left, the phone rings. It’s my son on his cel phone.  He says, “Mom, can you talk to this police officer? He wants to talk to you.”  Say what?"
A FEW MORE ARTICLES:

“Introduction: Asian American Suburban History” for the “Special Issue: Asians in the Suburbs,” guest edited by Becky Nicolaides, Journal of American Ethnic History 34: 2 (Winter 2015).  With articles by Willow Lung Amam, Jennifer Fang, and Mark Padoongpatt.

“The Social Fallout of Racial Politics: Civic Engagement in Suburban Pasadena, 1950-2000,” in Making Suburbia, edited by John Archer, Paul Sandul, and Katherine Solomonson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015)

“Suburban Landscapes of Los Angeles,” in Overdrive: Los Angeles Constructs the Future, 1940-1990, edited by Wim de Wit and Christopher James Alexander (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013)

“What about the ‘childish’ suburbs?” Newsday, January 25, 2009.
 
“Suburbia and Community,” CSW Update, January 2008, 13-19.
 
 “How Hell Moved from the City to the Suburbs: Urban Scholars and Changing Perceptions of Authentic Community,” in The New Suburban History, edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
 
 “The Neighborhood Politics of Class in a Working-Class Suburb of Los Angeles, 1920-1940,” Journal of Urban History, 30 (March 2004), 428-451.
 
 “Suburbia and the Sunbelt,” OAH Magazine of History, 18, 1 (October 2003), 21-26.

“‘Where the working man is welcomed’: Working-class suburbia in Los Angeles, 1900-1940,” Pacific Historical Review 68, 4 (November 1999): 517-559. 
* 2000 Louis Knott Koontz Memorial Award, American Historical Association Pacific Coast Branch