The development of suburbs—residential communities on the outskirts of cities—was one of the most dominant features of American life in the twentieth century. Far from being merely a way Americans organized their housing and ordered their landscape, the suburbs created an entirely new way of ordering American social life and culture. The result was a phenomenon known as "suburbia," a term denoting not only a physical place but often a cultural and social mind-set as well. The rise of suburbia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had a major role in the development of American culture, extending long-cherished American beliefs in individuality and an agrarian ideal in new ways while simultaneously working to reshape both the American physical and social landscape.

While suburbia had its major impact during the twentieth century, it originated and developed in the nineteenth century. "I view large cities," Thomas Jefferson once...