"Mention "shantytowns" today and the universal assumption is that you'll be talking about exploding slums in a developing nation in Africa, South Asia, or South America. This book adds the United States to the international discourse on shantytowns, tracing their appearance on both the western and urban frontiers of the young nation starting in the 1820s, and tracking them through the urbanization and industrialization that convulsed the country in the decades leading up to and following the Civil War. Drawing on a wealth of unexamined texts, images, popular music, and films, filtered through the lens of scholarship on everyday landscapes, Shantytown USA restores shantytowns to the central place they once occupied in the nation's imagination, and on its landscape."--Provided by publisher.