An outbreak of yellow fever struck Baltimore in the summer of 1800, claiming the lives of over a thousand residents. In a letter to Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson looked on what he thought was the bright side of this deadly epidemic. “The yellow fever,” the sage of Monticello intoned, “will discourage the growth of great cities in our nation; & I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man.”

Jefferson and many of his contemporaries viewed the yeoman farmer as the repository of republican virtue and sought to defend agrarian society against the advance of urban life. The political system they designed systematically disadvantaged urban areas relative to rural ones, and politically subordinated cities to their respective state governments.

US cities are weak, but as the legal scholar Richard Schragger argues in his excellent book City Power: Urban Governance in a Global Age, they are not powerless. By focusing on the provision of public services and expanding the scope of home rule, Schragger argues, urban progressives can improve people’s lives and build capacity to exercise power at the state and federal levels.