Becky Nicolaides

Becky Nicolaides is a historian and expert on American suburbs. Her latest book, The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945 (Oxford, Jan 2024) traces how the suburbs transitioned from lily-white to multiracial and reveals the compelling stories that unfolded through that change.

Becky has consulted for Survey LA, LA City, the State of California, she served on the LA Mayor’s Working Group on Civic Memory, and she is part of a transnational group of scholars collectively studying suburbanism in the EU and US. She is a co-founder of History Studio, a partnership of award-winning scholars providing expert research, script vetting, and original content for the entertainment industry.

She is launching a new initiative to help suburbs seeking to foster inclusive, welcoming communities, using The Suburb Toolkit.

About The New Suburbia:

After 1970, the suburbs transitioned from lily-white, middle class to the homeplace of a more typical cross-section of the nation—rich, poor, Black American, Latino, Asian, immigrant, the unhoused, the lavishly housed, and everyone in between.

The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles after 1945

reveals the compelling stories that unfolded through that change, focusing on Los Angeles at the vanguard of these trends.

On this familiar landscape, the American dream endured, even as the dreamers changed.

In addition to the impeccable research and thought-provoking analysis, The New Suburbia also shines a light on over 50 oral histories and interviews that have never been published.

Research and dedication to public access:

The New Suburbia draws on a large dataset on LA suburbs from 1950-2020. Some of this data will be available on the book’s companion website, and the entire dataset will be made public on the USC Digital Library website (open access) thanks to the author’s generosity, combined with an NEH grant for the USC Digital Library Project, which is set to go live in late Spring 2024.