Summary Of Sorting Out The New South City By Thomas W. Hanchett

Thomas W. Hanchett is a historian, who taught urban history and history preservation at Young Town State University and Cornell University. Hanchett is now currently working at the Levine Museum of New South in Charlotte as the staff historian and he is also the author of Sorting Out the New South City. Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte 1875-1975. The book is filled with his remarkable outpouring ideas that talks a lot about Charlotte during 1875-1975. He breaks down the content of the book into eight different tables and fifty-eight figures to help reader to understand his idea with a broader sense. In order to encourage readers to make connections to his report, Hanchett leads the reader to focus on his responses of questions that he brings up for his own curiosity. Have African Americans and whites always lived in a separate neighborhood? Why the workers started to live apart from their owners? What factors determined the patterns of Charlotte’s growth? These are the questions that Hanchett brings up and he would answer throughout the book in a detail manner.

In fact, everyone in American society has to read this book, because it allows the reader to understand the segregated American society throughout the history of Charlotte. Hatchett’s book is a type of book that gives an “aha moment” for the reader to understand why history is important. It lets the reader to make connections between the past and the present and makes us think how we become what we are right now. The author allows to do so by sharing his insightful analysis of the change of Charlotte from 1875 to 1975. His information not only helps to learn about history of Charlotte at that specific time but also the notion of the “segregated” social structure of our