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American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization

Neil Smith

An American Empire, constructed over the last century, long ago overtook European colonialism, and it has been widely assumed that the new globalism it espoused took us “beyond geography.” This book ... More

An American Empire, constructed over the last century, long ago overtook European colonialism, and it has been widely assumed that the new globalism it espoused took us “beyond geography.” This book debunks that assumption, offering an incisive argument that American globalism had a distinct geography and was pieced together as part of a powerful geographical vision. The power of geography did not die with the twilight of European colonialism, but it did change fundamentally. That the inauguration of the American Century brought a loss of public geographical sensibility in the United States was itself a political symptom of the emerging empire. This book provides a vital geographical-historical context for understanding the power and limits of contemporary globalization, which can now be seen as representing the third of three distinct historical moments of U.S. global ambition.Less

Big Sur: The Making of a Prized California Landscape

Shelley Alden Brooks

Big Sur embodies much of what has defined California since the mid-twentieth century. A remote, inaccessible, and undeveloped pastoral landscape until 1937, Big Sur quickly became a cultural symbol ... More

Big Sur embodies much of what has defined California since the mid-twentieth century. A remote, inaccessible, and undeveloped pastoral landscape until 1937, Big Sur quickly became a cultural symbol of California and the West—and a home to the ultra-wealthy. This transformation was due in part to writers and artists such as Robinson Jeffers and Ansel Adams, who created an enduring mystique for this coastline. But Big Sur’s prized coastline is also the product of the pioneering efforts of residents and Monterey County officials, who forged a collaborative public/private preservation model for Big Sur that foreshadowed the shape of California coastal preservation in the twenty-first century. Big Sur’s well-preserved vistas and high-end real estate situate this coastline somewhere between American ideals of development and wilderness. It is a space that challenges the way most Americans think of nature, its relationship to people, and what, in fact, makes it “wild.” This book highlights today’s complex and ambiguous intersections of class, the environment, and economic development through the lens of an iconic California landscape.Less

Black and Brown in Los Angeles: Beyond Conflict and Coalition

Josh Kun and Laura Pulido (eds)

This book is a timely and wide-ranging, interdisciplinary foray into the complicated world of multiethnic Los Angeles. The first book to focus exclusively on the range of relationships and ... More

This book is a timely and wide-ranging, interdisciplinary foray into the complicated world of multiethnic Los Angeles. The first book to focus exclusively on the range of relationships and interactions between Latinas/os and African Americans in one of the most diverse cities in the United States, it delivers supporting evidence that Los Angeles is a key place to study racial politics while also providing the basis for broader discussions of multiethnic America. Students, faculty, and interested readers will gain an understanding of the different forms of cultural borrowing and exchange that have shaped a terrain through which African Americans and Latinas/os cross paths, intersect, move in parallel tracks, and engage with a whole range of aspects of urban living. Tensions and shared intimacies are recurrent themes that emerge as the contributors seek to integrate artistic and cultural constructs with politics and economics in their goal of extending simple paradigms of conflict, cooperation, or coalition. The book features chapters by historians, economists, and cultural and ethnic studies scholars, alongside contributions by photographers and journalists working in Los Angeles.Less

Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle

Michael Keith Honey

The labor of black workers has been crucial to economic development in the United States. Yet because of racism and segregation, their contribution remains largely unknown. Spanning the 1930s to the ... More

The labor of black workers has been crucial to economic development in the United States. Yet because of racism and segregation, their contribution remains largely unknown. Spanning the 1930s to the present, this book tells the hidden history of African American workers in their own words. It provides striking firsthand accounts of the experiences of black southerners living under segregation in Memphis, Tennessee. Eloquent and personal, these oral histories comprise a unique primary source and provide a new way of understanding the black labor experience during the industrial era. Together, the stories demonstrate how black workers resisted racial apartheid in American industry and underscore the active role of black working people in history. The individual stories are arranged thematically in chapters on labor organizing, Jim Crow in the workplace, police brutality, white union racism, and civil rights struggles. Taken together, they ask us to rethink the conventional understanding of the civil rights movement as one led by young people and preachers in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, we see the freedom struggle as the product of generations of people, including workers who organized unions, resisted Jim Crow at work, and built up their families, churches, and communities. The collection also reveals the devastating impact that a globalizing capitalist economy has had on black communities and the importance of organizing the labor movement as an antidote to poverty.Less

Bohemian Los Angeles: and the Making of Modern Politics

Daniel Hurewitz

This book brings to life a vibrant and all-but-forgotten milieu of artists, leftists, and gay men and women whose story played out over the first half of the twentieth century and continues to shape ... More

This book brings to life a vibrant and all-but-forgotten milieu of artists, leftists, and gay men and women whose story played out over the first half of the twentieth century and continues to shape the entire American landscape. It is the story of a hidden corner of Los Angeles, where the personal first became the political, where the nation’s first enduring gay rights movement emerged, and where the broad spectrum of what we now think of as identity politics was born. Portraying life over a period of more than forty years in the hilly enclave of Edendale, near downtown Los Angeles, the book considers the work of painters and printmakers, looks inside the Communist Party’s intimate cultural scene, and examines the social world of gay men. In this vivid narrative, it discovers why and how these communities, inspiring both one another and the city as a whole, transformed American notions of political identity with their ideas about self-expression, political engagement, and race relations.Less

The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism

Karen Leong

Throughout the history of the United States, images of China have populated the American imagination. Always in flux, these images shift rapidly, as they did during the early decades of the twentieth ... More

Throughout the history of the United States, images of China have populated the American imagination. Always in flux, these images shift rapidly, as they did during the early decades of the twentieth century. In this erudite and original study, this book explores the gendering of American orientalism during the 1930s and 1940s. Focusing on three women who were popularly and publicly associated with China—Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, and Mayling Soong—this book shows how each negotiated what it meant to be American, Chinese American, and Chinese against the backdrop of changes in the United States as a national community and as an international power. This book illustrates how each of these women encountered the possibilities as well as the limitations of transnational status in attempting to shape her own opportunities. During these two decades, each woman enjoyed expanding visibility due to an increasingly global mass culture, rising nationalism in Asia, the emergence of the United States from the shadows of imperialism to world power, and the more assertive participation of women in civic and consumer culture.Less

Coastal Sage: Peter Douglas and the Fight to Save California's Shore

Thomas J. Osborne

There are moments when we forget how fortunate we are to have the California coast. The state is home to 1,100 miles of uninterrupted coastline defined by long stretches of beach and jagged rocky ... More

There are moments when we forget how fortunate we are to have the California coast. The state is home to 1,100 miles of uninterrupted coastline defined by long stretches of beach and jagged rocky cliffs. Coastal Sage chronicles the career and accomplishments of Peter Douglas, the longest-serving executive director of the California Coastal Commission. For nearly three decades, Douglas fought to keep the California coast public, prevent overdevelopment, and safeguard habitat. In doing so, Douglas emerged as a leading figure in the contemporary American environmental movement and influenced public conservation efforts across the country. He coauthored California’s foundational laws pertaining to shoreline management and conservation: Proposition 20 and the California Coastal Act. Many of the political battles to save the coast from overdevelopment and secure public access are revealed for the first time in this study of the leader who was at once a visionary, warrior, and coastal sage.Less

Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape, and Brainwashing

Susan Carruthers

This provocative history of early Cold War America recreates a time when World War III seemed imminent. Headlines were dominated by stories of Soviet slave laborers, brainwashed prisoners in Korea, ... More

This provocative history of early Cold War America recreates a time when World War III seemed imminent. Headlines were dominated by stories of Soviet slave laborers, brainwashed prisoners in Korea, and courageous escapees like Oksana Kasenkina who made a “leap for freedom” from the Soviet Consulate in New York. This book explores a central dimension of American culture and politics—the postwar preoccupation with captivity. “Menticide,” the calculated destruction of individual autonomy, struck many Americans as a more immediate danger than nuclear annihilation. Drawing upon a rich array of declassified documents, movies, and reportage—from national security directives to films like The Manchurian Candidate—this book explores the ways in which east-west disputes over prisoners, repatriation, and defection shaped popular culture. Captivity became a way to understand everything from the anomie of suburban housewives to the “slave world” of drug addiction. Sixty years later, this era may seem distant. Yet, with interrogation techniques derived from America's communist enemies now being used in the “war on terror,” the past remains powerfully present.Less

Color Line and the Assembly Line: Managing Race in the Ford Empire

Elizabeth D. Esch

Between World Wars 1 and 2, the Ford Motor Company globalized its sales and production and, in the process, became an exporter of American race practices and what this transnational study calls ... More

Between World Wars 1 and 2, the Ford Motor Company globalized its sales and production and, in the process, became an exporter of American race practices and what this transnational study calls “white managerialism.” In examining three societies—Brazil, South Africa, and the United States—where Ford supported white supremacist political and social policies, this study deepens our understanding of how American firms rose to prominence globally, including in parts of the world formerly dominated by the British Empire. It argues that seemingly arbitrary and irrational racist ideologies found material backing in managerial practices and policies initiated by Ford and supported by local and national governments. Its focus on the interwar years, when Ford hired unprecedented numbers of African American workers in its Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan, allows for a focus on those workers who were both simultaneously central to the Ford empire and treated as second-class citizens within it.Less

Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past

David Roediger

This book argues that in its political workings, its distribution of advantages, and its unspoken assumptions, the United States is a “still white” nation. Issues of race are decidedly not a thing of ... More

This book argues that in its political workings, its distribution of advantages, and its unspoken assumptions, the United States is a “still white” nation. Issues of race are decidedly not a thing of the past. The critical portraits of contemporary icons that lead off the book—Rush Limbaugh, Bill Clinton, O.J. Simpson, and Rudolph Giuliani—insist that continuities in white power and white identity are best understood by placing the recent past in a historical context. The book illuminates that history in an incisive critique of the current scholarship on whiteness and an account of race-transcending radicalism exemplified by vanguards such as W.E.B. Du Bois and John Brown. It shows that, for all of its staying power, white supremacy in the United States has always been a pursuit rather than a completed project, that divisions among whites have mattered greatly, and that “nonwhite” alternatives have profoundly challenged the status quo. The book reasons that, because race is a matter of culture and politics, racial oppression will not be solved by intermarriage or demographic shifts, but rather by political struggles that transform the meaning of race—especially its links to social and economic inequality. This work considers the ways that changes in immigration patterns, the labor force, popular culture, and social movements make it possible—though far from inevitable—that the United States might overcome white supremacy in the twenty-first century.Less

Cosmopolitans: A Social and Cultural History of the Jews of the San Francisco Bay Area

Fred Rosenbaum

Levi Strauss, A.L. Gump, Yehudi Menuhin, Gertrude Stein, Adolph Sutro, Congresswoman Florence Prag Kahn—Jewish people have been so enmeshed in life in and around San Francisco that their story is a ... More

Levi Strauss, A.L. Gump, Yehudi Menuhin, Gertrude Stein, Adolph Sutro, Congresswoman Florence Prag Kahn—Jewish people have been so enmeshed in life in and around San Francisco that their story is a chronicle of the metropolis itself. Since the Gold Rush, Bay Area Jews have countered stereotypes, working as farmers and miners, boxers and mountaineers. They were Gold Rush pioneers, Gilded Age tycoons, and Progressive Era reformers. Told through an astonishing range of characters and events, this book illuminates many aspects of Jewish life in the area: the high profile of Jewish women, extraordinary achievements in the business world, the cultural creativity of the second generation, the bitter debate about the proper response to the Holocaust and Zionism, and much more. Focusing in rich detail on the first hundred years after the Gold Rush, the book also takes the story up to the present day, demonstrating how unusually strong affinities for the arts and for the struggle for social justice have characterized this community even as it has changed over time. This book, set in the uncommonly diverse Bay Area, is a truly unique chapter of the Jewish experience in America.Less

Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia

Andrew Friedman

This spatial and cultural history chronicles how the CIA and other national security institutions that defined US foreign policy in the era of global decolonization created domestic space around ... More

This spatial and cultural history chronicles how the CIA and other national security institutions that defined US foreign policy in the era of global decolonization created domestic space around their own headquarters and abroad. The book argues for an alternate genealogy for US migration by tracing social and family relationships formed during violent US endeavors, which carried American agents abroad and migrants from Vietnam, El Salvador, Iran, and elsewhere home to the District of Columbia suburbs. As the US empire expressed itself abroad by developing roads, embassies, and villages, its subjects arrived in the covert capital as real estate agents, home owners, mall builders, and landscapers, constructing places and living monuments that both nurtured and critiqued postwar US foreign policy and global operations. In telling this geopolitical landscape’s full story for the first time, Covert Capital aims to renew interdisciplinary conversations about the nature of US citizenship, nationalism, global interconnection, and ethical responsibility by linking the country’s so-called foreign affairs with its most seemingly local and domestic moments. Ushering the study of the US empire into everyday life, the book explains how an imperial US citizenship was lived and disavowed in everyday space and re-narrates the history of postwar suburbanization as the spatial device that helped produce an imperial citizenry and subjectivity.Less

Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900-1940

Paul Sabin

Philip Rousseau (ed.)

Energy shortages, climate change, and the debate over national security have thrust oil policy to the forefront of American politics. How did Americans grow so dependent on petroleum, and what can we ... More

Energy shortages, climate change, and the debate over national security have thrust oil policy to the forefront of American politics. How did Americans grow so dependent on petroleum, and what can we learn from our history that will help us craft successful policies for the future? This book challenges us to see politics and law as crucial forces behind the dramatic growth of the U.S. oil market during the twentieth century. Using pre-World War II California as a case study of oil production and consumption, the book demonstrates how struggles in the legislature and courts over property rights, regulatory law, and public investment determined the shape of the state's petroleum landscape. The book provides a powerful corrective to the enduring myth of “free markets” by demonstrating how political decisions affected the institutions that underlie California's oil economy and how the oil market and price structure depend significantly on the ways in which policy questions were answered before World War II. This probing analysis casts fresh light on the historical relationship between business and government and on the origins of contemporary problems such as climate change and urban sprawl.Less

Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850-1915

Catherine Cocks

Tourists and travelers in the early nineteenth century saw American cities as ugly spaces, lacking the art and history that attracted thousands to the great cities of Europe. By the turn of the ... More

Tourists and travelers in the early nineteenth century saw American cities as ugly spaces, lacking the art and history that attracted thousands to the great cities of Europe. By the turn of the century, however, city touring became popular in the United States, and the era saw the rise of elegant hotels, packaged tours, and train travel to cities for vacations that would entertain and edify. This cultural history, studded with vivid details bringing the experience of Victorian-era travel alive, explores the beginnings of urban tourism, and sets the phenomenon within a larger cultural transformation that encompassed fundamental changes in urban life and national identity. Focusing mainly on New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, the book describes what it was like to ride on Pullman cars, stay in the grand hotels, and take in the sights of the cities. It draws on innovative readings of sources such as guidebooks, travel accounts, tourist magazines, and the journalism of the era. Exploring the full cultural context in which city touring became popular, the book ties together many themes in urban and cultural history, such as the relationships among class, gender, leisure, and the uses and perceptions of urban space.Less

Dynamics of the Contemporary University: Growth, Accretion, and Conflict

Neil J. Smelser

This book is an expanded version of the Clark Kerr Lectures of 2012, delivered by the author at the University of California at Berkeley in January and February of that year.The initial exposition is ... More

This book is an expanded version of the Clark Kerr Lectures of 2012, delivered by the author at the University of California at Berkeley in January and February of that year.The initial exposition is of a theory of change—labeled structural accretion—that has characterized the history of American higher education, mainly (but not exclusively) of universities. The essence of the theory is that institutions of higher education progressively add functions, structures, and constituencies as they grow, but seldom shed them, yielding increasingly complex structures.The first two lectures trace the multiple ramifications of this principle into other arenas, namely (a) the essence of complexity in the academic setting, (b) the solidification of academic disciplines and departments, (c) changes in faculty roles and the academic community, (d) the growth of political constituencies, (e) academic administration and governance, and (f) academic stratification by prestige.The final chapter analyzes a number of contemporary trends and problems that are superimposed on the already-complex structures of higher education.The major trends are:the diminishing public support without alterations of governance and accountability, the increasing pattern of commercialization in higher education, the growth of distance-learning and for-profit institutions, and the spectacular growth of temporary and part-time faculty.Less

The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974: A Political History

James Wooten

This study of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) explains in detail how public officials in the executive branch and Congress overcame strong opposition from business and ... More

This study of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) explains in detail how public officials in the executive branch and Congress overcame strong opposition from business and organized labor to pass landmark legislation regulating employer-sponsored retirement and health plans. Before Congress passed ERISA, federal law gave employers and unions great discretion in the design and operation of employee benefit plans. Most importantly, firms and unions could and often did establish pension plans that placed employees at great risk for not receiving any retirement benefits. In the early 1960s, officials in the executive branch proposed a number of regulatory initiatives to protect employees, but business groups and most labor unions objected to the key proposals. Faced with opposition from powerful interest groups, legislative entrepreneurs in Congress, chiefly New York Republican senator Jacob K. Javits, took the case for pension reform directly to voters by publicizing frightening statistics and “horror stories” about pension plans. This deft and successful effort to mobilize the media and public opinion overwhelmed the business community and organized labor and persuaded Javits’s colleagues in Congress to support comprehensive pension reform legislation. The enactment of ERISA in September 1974 recast federal policy for private pension plans by making worker security an overriding objective of federal law.Less

The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten

Gerald Horne

Before he attained notoriety as Dean of the Hollywood Ten—the blacklisted screenwriters and directors persecuted because of their varying ties to the Communist Party—John Howard Lawson had become one ... More

Before he attained notoriety as Dean of the Hollywood Ten—the blacklisted screenwriters and directors persecuted because of their varying ties to the Communist Party—John Howard Lawson had become one of the most brilliant, successful, and intellectual screenwriters on the Hollywood scene in the 1930s and 1940s, with several hits to his credit including Blockade, Sahara, and Action in the North Atlantic. After his infamous, almost violent, 1947 hearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Lawson spent time in prison and his lucrative career was effectively over. Studded with anecdotes and based on previously untapped archives, this biography of Lawson brings alive his era and features many of his prominent friends and associates, including John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Chaplin, Gene Kelly, Edmund Wilson, Ernest Hemingway, Humphrey Bogart, Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner, Jr., and many others. Lawson's life becomes a prism through which we gain a clearer perspective on the evolution and machinations of McCarthyism and anti-Semitism in the United States, on the influence of the left on Hollywood, and on a fascinating man whose radicalism served as a foil for launching the political careers of two Presidents: Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.Less

Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America

Mark Padoongpatt

Flavors of Empire examines the rise of Thai food and the way it shaped the racial and ethnic contours of Thai American identity and community. Mark Padoongpatt makes use of original archival research ... More

Flavors of Empire examines the rise of Thai food and the way it shaped the racial and ethnic contours of Thai American identity and community. Mark Padoongpatt makes use of original archival research and rich oral histories to explore the factors that made foodways central to the Thai American experience. Starting with the U.S. Cold War intervention in Thailand, he traces how the informal U.S. empire allowed Americans to discover Thai food and introduce it to adventurous eaters back home. When Thais arrived in Los Angeles, they reinvented and repackaged Thai cuisine in various ways to meet its rising popularity in urban and suburban spaces. America's fascination with Thai cuisine resulted in Thais having to remake themselves over the second half of the twentieth century in relation to the perceived exoticness and sensuousness of Thai food. Padoongpatt argues that this remaking produced "Thai Americans"—not a cultural identity rooted in ethnic difference but a social and political relationship defined by U.S. empire, liberal multiculturalism, and racial geography of Los Angeles. He also contends that while food brought Thais together, provided a sense of pride and visibility, and allowed Thai Americans to lay claims to their place in the city, it also led to divisions within the community and created barriers to collective mobilization for social justice. Padoongpatt deftly handles the history, politics, and tastes of Thai food, all while demonstrating the way racial projects emerge in seemingly mundane and unexpected places in an era of multiculturalism.Less

The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s

Robert Cohen (ed.)

This book is about Berkeley's celebrated Free Speech Movement (FSM) of 1964. Drawing from the experiences of many movement veterans, the chapters of this book illuminate in fresh ways one of the most ... More

This book is about Berkeley's celebrated Free Speech Movement (FSM) of 1964. Drawing from the experiences of many movement veterans, the chapters of this book illuminate in fresh ways one of the most important events in the recent history of American higher education. The chapters shed new light on such issues as the origins of the FSM in the civil rights movement, the political tensions within the FSM, the day-to-day dynamics of the protest movement, the role of the Berkeley faculty and its various factions, the 1965 trial of the arrested students, and the virtually unknown “little Free Speech Movement of 1966”.Less

Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files

Jon Wiener

This book tells the story of the author's remarkable fourteen-year court battle to win release of the FBI's surveillance files on John Lennon under the Freedom of Information Act. The files had been ... More

This book tells the story of the author's remarkable fourteen-year court battle to win release of the FBI's surveillance files on John Lennon under the Freedom of Information Act. The files had been withheld on the grounds that releasing them would endanger national security. Lennon's file was compiled in 1972, when the war in Vietnam was at its peak, when Nixon was facing re-election, and when the “clever Beatle” was living in New York and joining up with the New Left and the anti-war movement. The Nixon administration's efforts to “neutralize” Lennon are the subject of Lennon's file. The documents are reproduced in facsimile so that readers can see all the classification stamps, marginal notes, blacked out passages and—in some cases—the initials of FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover. The file includes lengthy reports by confidential informants detailing the daily lives of anti-war activists, memos to the White House, transcripts of TV shows on which Lennon appeared, and a proposal that Lennon be arrested by local police on drug charges. The book documents an era when rock music seemed to have real political force and when youth culture challenged the status quo in Washington. It also delineates the ways the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations fought to preserve government secrecy, and highlights the legal strategies adopted by those who have challenged it.Less