Bryant Simon

Bryant Simon is Professor of History at Temple University and the author of Everything But the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks (2008), Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America (2004), and co-editor of Jumpin’ Jim Crow’: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (2000). His work on Atlantic City has won awards from the Organization of American Historians, the Urban History Association, and the New Jersey Historical Commission.

Atlantic City, New Jersey

Before Disneyland, Atlantic City was the first great middle-class resort in the nation, especially the Philadelphia region. From its founding in the 1850s through the early decades of the twenty-first century, Atlantic City succeeded and failed based on its ability to make itself in the image of the American middle class. As the cultural tastes and social attitudes of the shop owners, ...