To set the context for the chapters to come, this introduction focuses on two items. First, it discusses the arc from postwar urban crisis and predictions of the posturban future that ran through the 1990s to the city’s apparent resurgence and the cultural and political backlash that are the volume’s occasion. It then turns to the antiurban theme that persisted in American literary history and American Studies through much of the twentieth century to remind us that disdain for the city, as site and symbol of modernity, has a history across the political spectrum.