Class News

Howard Gillette '64 publishes Camden After the Fall

Last November, nearly 400 people gathered at a Rutgers-Camden conference titled "Beyond the Post-Industrial City." One purpose was to mark the publication of Camden After the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a Post-Industrial City, by Dr. Howard Gillette, Yale '64 (see credentials).

A review for the U. of Pennsylvania Press says that it "Camden After the Fall is a thorough, well-researched, and important book. Through a careful analysis of people and politics, Gillette challenges the accepted narrative of postwar urban decline. The story of Camden is of special consequence to urban historians, historians of late twentieth-century U.S. political economy, and students of contemporary urban policy. Gillette is certainly the person to tell that story."

A previous article on this website in 2001 cited an interview with the author in the Philadelphia Inquirer, which discussed Howard's research for this book and finished with his comment: "I hope that when I finish the work, the city would have turned a corner and I can say something really positive." Read the book and judge for yourself.

---

Credentials

Howard Gillette is Professor of History at Rutgers-Camden. He specializes in modern U.S. history, with a special interest in urban and regional development. Previously he taught at George Washington University and the University of Pennsylvania. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in American Studies From Yale University.

Professor Gillette is Director of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities, a research and advocacy organization for bringing new intellectual and monetary resources to cultural practice in the humanities as it relates to the Mid-Atlantic states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. His work in public history has included a role as a founder and first director of the Center for Washington Area Studies at the George Washington University and as editor of Washington History, the journal of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography and the Journal of Planning History. He is a past president of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History and a former board member of the Historical Society of Washington and the Camden County Historical Society. He is the author, among other works, of Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).