To many, Newark seems a profound symbol of postwar liberalism’s failings: an impoverished, deeply divided city where commitments to integration and widespread economic security went up in flames during the 1967 riots. While it’s true that these failings shaped Newark’s postwar landscape and economy, as Mark Krasovic shows, that is far from the whole story.

The Newark Frontier shows how, during the Great Society, urban liberalism adapted and grew, defining itself less by centralized programs and ideals than by administrative innovation and the small-scale, personal interactions generated by community action programs, investigative commissions, and police-community relations projects. Paying particular attention to the fine-grained experiences of Newark residents, Krasovic reveals that this liberalism was rooted in an ethic of experimentation and local knowledge. He illustrates this with stories of innovation within government offices, the dynamic encounters between local activists and state agencies, and the unlikely alliances among nominal enemies. Krasovic makes clear that postwar liberalism’s eventual fate had as much to do with the experiments waged in Newark as it did with the violence that rocked the city in the summer of 1967.

Mark Krasovic is assistant professor of history and American studies and associate director of the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers University—Newark.

— Howard Gillette, Jr., author of Camden After the Fall

— Susan Youngblood Ashmore, author of Carry It On: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1964–1972

— Alison Isenberg, author of Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It

— The Journal of African American History