How does it matter that urban historians often read the history of education in post-World War II American cities through stories of school segregation, desegregation, and resegregation? Each of the books under review here raises this question, even as they interpret city schools from different approaches and frameworks—urban case study, biography, policy history, contemporary social science—and different degrees of engagement with the history of the black freedom struggle. None claim to offer a complete, synthetic view of urban educational history for the post-World War II decades, but together they demonstrate the richness, importance, and complexity of studying schooling, justice, and the city. They also illustrate the primary hold that narratives of segregation and desegregation have on histories of education in this era. 1 The focus on desegregation has leveraged rich social histories that, at their best, examine the experience of schooling and the politics of segregation and desegregation across lines of race, class, and ideology. Yet, at times, this emphasis has ignored other important areas. What was the shape of teaching and learning in city schools, of various demographic compositions, for example? What made big-city school systems function as they did? What happened to the questions that preoccupied an earlier generation of educational historians—the role of schools in class formation and class mobility, or the ways that dominant economic structures provided models for and influence on schooling? Examining urban schooling through the frame of segregation and desegregation, at its worst, risks reifying false messages that were at times furthered by desegregation advocacy: that segre-