This chapter explains how racial residential segregation affects the health of Black Americans. Housing is highly racially segregated in most American cities. While this occurs to some extent because people want to live with other people similar to them, it is primarily due to governmental policies and private business practices that created widespread residential segregation by severely restricting where Black people could live. The neighborhoods to which Black Americans were relegated were typically in undesirable areas, physically separated from the larger community, and containing few resources. Once these neighborhoods were created, the practices of banks (e.g., refusing loans) and real estate firms (e.g., restrictive covenants) made it difficult for Black Americans to improve these areas or to leave them. Living in these neighborhoods makes poverty more likely, which, by itself, is associated with poorer health. These neighborhoods are also more likely to have high levels of environmental toxins (e.g., polluted air and water), limited availability of healthy food, unhealthy built environments (e.g., dangerous housing, absence of green spaces), and limited access to healthcare. In sum, residential segregation, which is the product of anti-Black racism, creates living conditions that threaten Black Americans’ health.

Although the Ottoman conquest is traditionally interpreted as a violent break with the past, this chapter demonstrates that it was enabled by diplomacy as much as warfare. The chapter discusses the early modern Serb society, which formed in the imperial borderlands and was shaped by migrations and wars fought between Christian coalitions led by Hungary and Austria and the Ottoman Empire. Other main topics discussed include the restoration of the Serbian church in the sixteenth century, conversion to Islam of the local population, and migrations to the north of the Danube, following which a Serb plurality was established in southern Hungary. Orthodox Serbs also settled, alongside Catholic Croats, in the Habsburg Military Border, while others were recruited by Ottoman and Venetian armies. During this period, Serbian Orthodox patriarchs became de facto proto-ethnic leaders. A rich oral tradition preserved, and invented, a collective memory of medieval Serbia, while in the eighteenth century educated Serbs embraced the Enlightenment ideas and began to think of Serbs as a modern nation.