During the twentieth century, thousands of new cities took shape across America. Stucco subdivisions sprawled and law followed, enabling suburbs to adopt independent governments. That story is familiar. But meanwhile, something else was also happening. A smaller but sizable number of cities were dying, closing down their municipal governments and returning to dependence on counties. Some were ghost towns, emptied of population. In those places, jobs were lost and families struggled; crops died off and industries moved on. Other dead cities were humming with civic life: places with people but no longer with separate governments. In these cities, citizens from the political left and right, often in coalition, rose up to eliminate their local governments.

As an end in itself, understanding these changes would be worthwhile. But this past has not passed. Unprecedented numbers of cities and citizens are currently considering disincorporation in response to economic crisis and population loss. The dissolution law to which they are turning, as it is written in state codes and as it is understood in theory, is immature and thin. Cities’ experiences with dissolution are unknown, constraining our ability to judge the values it serves or undermines. If dissolution is to grow in importance as part of the legal machinery of urban decline, we must understand what it meant in the decades that came before.

Dissolving Cities tells the story of municipal dissolution. It is an article of law, theory, and urban history—a reminder that urban growth and local government fragmentation, which have long dominated academic discourse on cities, may not be the upward ratchet we have assumed them to be. Cities can die, and when they do, they raise critical questions about decline, governance, taxes, race, and community.

The United States is the only country in the world where voters elect prosecutors. But the American prosecutor did not start as an elected official. After the Revolutionary War, most states gave their governors, judges, or legislators the power to appoint prosecutors. Starting with Mississippi in 1832, however, states adopted new constitutions, statutes, or amendments that made prosecutors elected officials. By 1861, nearly three-quarters of the states in the Union elected their prosecutors.

This Note is the first detailed study of when, how, and why American state and local prosecutors became elected officials. It shows that fairness and efficiency concerns were largely absent from the debates over whether to make prosecutors elected. Instead, supporters of elected prosecutors were responding to governors and legislators who used the appointment system for political patronage. As prosecutors gained discretionary power over criminal prosecutions, mid-nineteenth-century political reformers believed it was crucial to remove prosecutors from partisan politics. Many also hoped elected prosecutors would be more accountable to the voters and the local communities they served. Not long after prosecutors became elected, however, prosecutors quickly became involved in and co-opted by partisan politics.