Kenneth T. Jackson, a Columbia University historian and editor of the Encyclopedia of New York City, provides the definitive account of how the United States became a suburban nation. From the first commuter railroads in the 1830s through the highway-driven sprawl of the postwar era, Jackson traces the forces that drew Americans away from cities toward single-family homes on individual plots of land. The book examines how technological innovations in transportation, changes in housing finance, government policies including FHA mortgage insurance and highway construction, and cultural ideals of domesticity combined to make suburbanization appear natural and inevitable. Jackson documents the racial exclusion embedded in suburban development, showing how restrictive covenants, redlining, and discriminatory lending systematically denied Black Americans access to suburban homeownership and the wealth accumulation it enabled. He compares American patterns with European cities that remained compact and transit-oriented, demonstrating that suburban sprawl was a choice rather than a necessity. The environmental, social, and fiscal costs of sprawl receive careful attention, from automobile dependence to the decline of public space to the fiscal strain on municipalities trying to service spread-out development. While published in 1985, the book's analysis remains essential for understanding how American metropolitan areas reached their current form and what alternatives might have existed.