Blair Ruble, a renowned American scholar of world urban culture, has dedicated this book to the history of Washington’s U Street. Since the founding of Washington, D.C. as the capital of the United States in the late 18th century, U Street and its environs have been the locus — physically and symbolically — of a unique black culture, the site of a complex, contradictory, and dramatic process of interaction between America’s white and black communities. The turbulent biography of U Street reconstructed by the author is a fascinating, large-scale narrative of a special microcosm that undoubtedly changed the face of the United States, filled with a mass of vivid episodes, bright pictures, facts and testimonies.