Born in 1952 in
Paramus, New Jersey, Cohen grew up in
Bergen County, New Jersey, and in
Westchester County, New York. She earned her
A.B. degree from
Princeton University, and both her
M.A. and
Ph.D. from the
University of California, Berkeley. Cohen authored
Making a New Deal, a book about the social history of 20th-century American politics. In that book, a case study of Chicago, Cohen argues that working-class urban residents found a common identity as Americans and as New Dealers as the result of their incorporation into a burgeoning mass culture and especially as the result of the devastating effects of the Depression on urban ethnic stores, businesses, and institutions. Cohen also offers a provocative argument about the rise of the
Congress of Industrial Organizations during the 1930s. She contends that a working-class "culture of unity" broke down ethnic divisions and animosities and made possible widescale industrial unionization. Cohen's analysis of working-class popular culture (shopping, movie-going, and radio) during the 1920s was a pioneering effort in the study of vernacular
consumerism, a theme that she developed with more of a political focus in her next book, ''A Consumers' Republic''. Through a deeply documented history of urban and suburban New Jersey, embedded in a larger analysis about the transformation of post-New Deal liberalism, Cohen explores the ways that people's identities as consumers shaped their politics after World War II. Building on her interests on architecture, planning, and the built environment, the book is particularly noteworthy for its engagement with earlier work on the politics of suburbanization by scholars like
Kenneth T. Jackson. Cohen explores such topics as the rise of shopping malls, the emergence of a consumers' rights movement, and the relationship of consumerism to civil rights activism in the mid-twentieth century. ''A Consumer's Republic'' begins with her recollections of growing up in suburban
New Jersey and draws from extensive research in archives in the Garden State. Her most recent book is
Saving America’s Cities, which revisits federal urban renewal by following the career of
Edward J. Logue, whose shifting approach to the post-World War II urban crisis tracked the changing balance between government-funded public programs and private-sector initiatives. A Yale-trained lawyer and sometime critic of both
Robert Moses and
Jane Jacobs, Logue saw urban renewal as an extension of the liberal New Deal. He worked to revive a declining New Haven in the 1950s, became the architect of the “New Boston” of the 1960s, and later led the
New York State Urban Development Corporation (1968-1975) and the South Bronx Development Organization (1978-1985). Cohen probes the destructiveness of federally funded urban renewal, but also its successes and progressive goals. ==Awards and memberships==