We are thrilled to announce that the annual Leo P. Ribuffo Dissertation Prize has been awarded to Jacob Anbinder, “Cities of Amber: Antigrowth Politics and the Making of Modern Liberalism.” The Society for U.S. Intellectual History established the Leo P. Ribuffo Prize for Best Dissertation in U.S. Intellectual History in 2023. Ribuffo, a revered scholar and exemplary mentor, reshaped the field during his long and illustrious career at George Washington University. The award seeks to honor his life and career by recognizing the distinguished work of emerging scholars and to advance the highest levels of research, writing, and scholarship. Many thanks to the committee (Benjamin E. Alpers, Elesha Coffman, Joan Shelley Rubin) for their diligent work.
The committee writes: “Jacob Anbinder’s dissertation “Cities of Amber: Antigrowth Politics and the Making of Modern Liberalism” analyzes a sea change that took place in American politics during the second half of the 20th century. While mid-century American liberals had almost universally embraced metropolitan growth as a central component of their vision of the nation’s future, in the decades after World War II, liberals began to turn against urban growth and embrace a new antigrowth ideology. This deeply researched and beautifully written dissertation explores the slow and steady emergence of these changes in American liberalism over the course of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, and suggests the impact they had on the politics of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 21st century.
“Cities of Amber” is particularly focused on the politics of growth in two quite different settings: New York City and California. Anbinder deepens our understanding of the history of both these places. Jane Jacobs’s celebration of the “sidewalk ballet” of her beloved Greenwich Village and opposition to the dominant, pro-growth modes of urban planning represented by Robert Moses helped shift historical preservation from being a predominantly conservative movement in New York City to a largely liberal one. As ideas of local control, borrowed in part from the New Left, and neighborhood preservation came to dominate post-Tammany New York politics, building new housing became ever more difficult. On the other coast, attempts to limit the explosive growth that California’s cities had experienced through the 1960s, similarly shifted the politics of liberalism in that state. Driven both by statewide environmental preservation efforts and local efforts to cap population growth, Californian antigrowth liberals formed an important part of the coalition that passed the now infamous Proposition 13 in 1978, which not only reflected antigrowth politics but boosted them.
Throughout “Cities of Amber,” Anbinder is attendant to the relationship between ideas, politics, and the material conditions of people’s lives. In doing so, he provides an understanding of antigrowth politics that goes beyond the now common account of “NIMBYism” and provides a richer understanding of the changes in American liberalism over the last seventy-five years, an especially important achievement as historians’ focus on conservatism in the recent American past sometimes obscures the still critical role that liberal ideology has played in American life.”
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