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Urban Rifts And Religious Reciprocity: Chicago And The Catholic Church, 1965-1996, Dominic E. Faraone

Dissertations (1934 -)

From the late 1960s onward, a sequence of unusually transformative, combustible, and sometimes alarming urban phenomena beset the city of Chicago and bred considerable turmoil and uncertainty: post-industrial transition; street gang activity and unprecedented levels of interpersonal violence; the political ascendancy in 1983 of African American reform candidate Harold Washington to the mayor's seat; gay liberation; and AIDS. Each accentuated a host of social and/or spatial rifts--between the deteriorating city and comparatively thriving suburbs; the economically impoverished, culturally alienated, and frequently isolated inner city and the rest of Chicago; machine and reform politicians; Black lawmakers and White "ethnics"; sexual majorities …