and macroeconomic levels of analysis. His microeconomic perspective on immigration suggests that the local impact of immigration on the job market is mixed and not nearly as disruptive to less privileged Americans as some critics, such as Borjas, have sometimes claimed. He finds the macroeconomic effect of immigration even more positive because in an open economy immigration contributes to efficiency and productivity. Kane also addresses critics who charge that newcomers from abroad pose a threat to the culture of the American people. Nativists see in the nation’s increasing cultural diversity a threat best neutralized by exclusion. Kane, however, sees cultural diversity as an American strength that was present from the earliest days of the country’s history. He deplores the contemporary conflating of immigration and racial-identity politics, focusing instead upon “the common unity of ideas embodied in [the United States’] founding documents,” such as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (13). At times, Kane’s pro-immigration argument seems unrelentingly positive. His focus on the long-term benefits of immigration causes him to pay scant attention to its short-term burdens on local communities. Therefore, he does not adequately address immigration reform from the perspective of redistributing the immediate costs of settling newcomers into homes, jobs, and schools. Kane’s abundant evidence in support of immigration’s importance in shaping America’s strength and prosperity throughout its history fuels a persuasive argument that will engage scholars in think tanks and classrooms. It will also stoke the fire of an already heated contemporary debate about current policies.
{"title":"Degrees of Equality: Abolitionist Colleges and the Politics of Race by John Frederick Bell","authors":"Mark Boonshoft","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01923","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01923","url":null,"abstract":"and macroeconomic levels of analysis. His microeconomic perspective on immigration suggests that the local impact of immigration on the job market is mixed and not nearly as disruptive to less privileged Americans as some critics, such as Borjas, have sometimes claimed. He finds the macroeconomic effect of immigration even more positive because in an open economy immigration contributes to efficiency and productivity. Kane also addresses critics who charge that newcomers from abroad pose a threat to the culture of the American people. Nativists see in the nation’s increasing cultural diversity a threat best neutralized by exclusion. Kane, however, sees cultural diversity as an American strength that was present from the earliest days of the country’s history. He deplores the contemporary conflating of immigration and racial-identity politics, focusing instead upon “the common unity of ideas embodied in [the United States’] founding documents,” such as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (13). At times, Kane’s pro-immigration argument seems unrelentingly positive. His focus on the long-term benefits of immigration causes him to pay scant attention to its short-term burdens on local communities. Therefore, he does not adequately address immigration reform from the perspective of redistributing the immediate costs of settling newcomers into homes, jobs, and schools. Kane’s abundant evidence in support of immigration’s importance in shaping America’s strength and prosperity throughout its history fuels a persuasive argument that will engage scholars in think tanks and classrooms. It will also stoke the fire of an already heated contemporary debate about current policies.","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64386382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
epistemological chasm between the men. He quotes a frustrated Scott lamenting obliquely in the Mission’s newsletter shortly before his ouster that “nothing saps a man’s strength like prejudice” (196). Nothing in what Englund writes suggests that Hetherwick was a stalking horse for the extreme segregation prevalent in southern Africa a half-century later. This book insists, however, that “Hetherwick’s leadership erased any alternatives that Scott’s vision may have suggested” for a more egalitarian society in Central Africa (264). Nonetheless, as a methodological tour de force, Visions for Racial Equality exceeds in both scope and execution another intellectual biography, that of T. Cullen Young, another otherwise neglected Scottish missionary in central Africa. In so doing, Englund opens a much richer view to the history, and historiography, of Malawi.
{"title":"East Africa after Liberation: Conflict, Security, and the State since the 1980s by Jonathan Fisher","authors":"Christopher Day","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01931","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01931","url":null,"abstract":"epistemological chasm between the men. He quotes a frustrated Scott lamenting obliquely in the Mission’s newsletter shortly before his ouster that “nothing saps a man’s strength like prejudice” (196). Nothing in what Englund writes suggests that Hetherwick was a stalking horse for the extreme segregation prevalent in southern Africa a half-century later. This book insists, however, that “Hetherwick’s leadership erased any alternatives that Scott’s vision may have suggested” for a more egalitarian society in Central Africa (264). Nonetheless, as a methodological tour de force, Visions for Racial Equality exceeds in both scope and execution another intellectual biography, that of T. Cullen Young, another otherwise neglected Scottish missionary in central Africa. In so doing, Englund opens a much richer view to the history, and historiography, of Malawi.","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91072673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Boundaries of Freedom: Slavery, Abolition, and the Making of Modern Brazil Edited by Brodwyn Fischer and Keila Grinberg","authors":"Dale T. Graden","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01928","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01928","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47542045","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This book grows out of Fowler’s previous studies of the forceful negotiations that dominated the early political life of nineteenth-century Mexico. Known as pronunciamientos, these tense affairs usually ended without cataclysmic violence and led to concessions and agreement between the contending factions. In short, Fowler has already demonstrated how democracy by other means functioned in Mexico. Such was not the case with the War of Reform from 1857 to 1861, in which the fighting claimed approximately 200,000 lives. The Grammar of Civil War explores how and why this exceptional violence came to pass. But Fowler has more than the history of Mexico on his mind this time around. After all, his previous monograph, La Guerra de Tres Años, 1857–1861 (Mexico City, 2020) delves fully into that conflict as a singular military episode. The titular “grammar” of his present study amounts to an analytical framework that Fowler proposes for the study of any modern civil conflict around the world. He maintains that the deployment of this model can explicate even such far-flung events as the seventeenthcentury English Civil War and the twenty-first-century Syrian civil war. Fowler begins by drawing from the contributions of political scientists like Kalyvas, Sambanis, and Conteh-Morgan to develop his definition of civil war. Crudely summarized, civil wars are conflicts located within the bounds of a nation-state that features a single government prior to the commencement of hostilities. They also involve at least two warring parties—one of which enjoys government sponsorship. Finally, civil wars require competing political factions that lay claim to national authority, sustained military operations, and a significant death toll of military and civilian lives on each side (7). Fowler closes his introduction by elucidating a tripartite framework for understanding how civil wars begin, the internal dynamics that compel people to continue fighting once war has begun, and the ways in which civil wars end. Each of these components receives consistent and clear explanation in a chapter of its own. To understand how civil wars begin, Fowler examines the macro-transnational sphere alongside the national-regional context, which encompasses structural contributing factors, social divides, ideological disputes, and cultural concerns. Amid these swirling forces, an activation period that is difficult to predict and even more challenging to defuse commences. He identifies eight unique but linked components that must become manifest before the preceding stress factors culminate in a civil war.
这本书源于福勒之前对19世纪墨西哥早期政治生活中主导的有力谈判的研究。这些紧张的事件被称为prounciamintos，通常在没有发生灾难性暴力的情况下结束，并导致对立派系之间的让步和协议。简言之，福勒已经证明了民主是如何通过其他方式在墨西哥发挥作用的。1857年至1861年的改革战争并非如此，这场战争夺走了大约20万人的生命。《内战语法》探讨了这种特殊的暴力事件是如何发生的以及为什么发生的。但福勒这次想到的不仅仅是墨西哥的历史。毕竟，他之前的专著《La Guerra de Tres Años，1857-1861》（墨西哥城，2020）将这场冲突作为一个独特的军事事件进行了全面的探讨。福勒为研究世界各地的任何现代国内冲突提出了一个分析框架，他目前研究的名义上的“语法”相当于这个框架。他坚持认为，这个模型的部署甚至可以解释像17世纪的英国内战和21世纪的叙利亚内战这样遥远的事件。Fowler从Kalyvas、Sambanis和Conteh Morgan等政治学家的贡献开始，发展了他对内战的定义。粗略地总结一下，内战是指在敌对行动开始前，以单一政府为特征的民族国家范围内的冲突。他们还涉及至少两个交战方，其中一个得到了政府的赞助。最后，内战需要相互竞争的政治派别对国家权威提出要求，需要持续的军事行动，双方都需要大量的军人和平民死亡（7）。Fowler在引言的最后阐述了一个三方框架，用于理解内战是如何开始的，战争开始后迫使人们继续战斗的内部动力，以及内战结束的方式。这些组成部分中的每一个都在自己的一章中得到了一致而清晰的解释。为了理解内战是如何开始的，Fowler将宏观跨国领域与国家-地区背景一起进行了研究，其中包括结构性因素、社会分歧、意识形态争端和文化问题。在这些旋转的力量中，一个难以预测、甚至更具挑战性的激活期开始了。他确定了八个独特但相互关联的组成部分，这些组成部分必须在之前的压力因素导致内战之前显现出来。
{"title":"The Grammar of Civil War: A Mexican Case Study, 1857–61 by Will Fowler","authors":"","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01927","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01927","url":null,"abstract":"This book grows out of Fowler’s previous studies of the forceful negotiations that dominated the early political life of nineteenth-century Mexico. Known as pronunciamientos, these tense affairs usually ended without cataclysmic violence and led to concessions and agreement between the contending factions. In short, Fowler has already demonstrated how democracy by other means functioned in Mexico. Such was not the case with the War of Reform from 1857 to 1861, in which the fighting claimed approximately 200,000 lives. The Grammar of Civil War explores how and why this exceptional violence came to pass. But Fowler has more than the history of Mexico on his mind this time around. After all, his previous monograph, La Guerra de Tres Años, 1857–1861 (Mexico City, 2020) delves fully into that conflict as a singular military episode. The titular “grammar” of his present study amounts to an analytical framework that Fowler proposes for the study of any modern civil conflict around the world. He maintains that the deployment of this model can explicate even such far-flung events as the seventeenthcentury English Civil War and the twenty-first-century Syrian civil war. Fowler begins by drawing from the contributions of political scientists like Kalyvas, Sambanis, and Conteh-Morgan to develop his definition of civil war. Crudely summarized, civil wars are conflicts located within the bounds of a nation-state that features a single government prior to the commencement of hostilities. They also involve at least two warring parties—one of which enjoys government sponsorship. Finally, civil wars require competing political factions that lay claim to national authority, sustained military operations, and a significant death toll of military and civilian lives on each side (7). Fowler closes his introduction by elucidating a tripartite framework for understanding how civil wars begin, the internal dynamics that compel people to continue fighting once war has begun, and the ways in which civil wars end. Each of these components receives consistent and clear explanation in a chapter of its own. To understand how civil wars begin, Fowler examines the macro-transnational sphere alongside the national-regional context, which encompasses structural contributing factors, social divides, ideological disputes, and cultural concerns. Amid these swirling forces, an activation period that is difficult to predict and even more challenging to defuse commences. He identifies eight unique but linked components that must become manifest before the preceding stress factors culminate in a civil war.","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49259241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Walvin’s concise review of slavery in the Atlantic argues that slavery has transformed the West or, indeed, the world to the present day. Chapters in six sections include overviews of Iberian and northern European slave systems, examples from the Middle Passage, slave trade within Brazil and the United States, “managing slavery,” the campaign for freedom, and the argument about the world transformed by slavery—as seen through sugar, tobacco, servile labor, and plantation economies. Walvin’s purpose for writing the book was to restate the history of slavery in support of the discourse around Black Lives Matter. The book’s most original observations are signaled at the opening of the concluding chapter: “The furore which swept round the globe in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in May 2020 brought slavery back into widespread public debate.” In Walvin’s words, “Critics everywhere were swift to point out that the origins of that injustice lay deep in the history of relations between Black and white ... [and] the history of slavery” (331). As he suggests, public discourse turns to history when the issues become most painful and difficult. Walvin argues that the intensity of the reaction to Floyd’s death was reinforced by an earlier debate. “The 1619 Project,” a series published in New York Times Magazine, appeared in 2019 with the 400th anniversary of the delivery of African captives to Virginia. These essays, which reviewed U.S. history through the lens of slavery, prompted heated discussion among Americans of varied backgrounds, but they made virtually no reference to history outside the United States. Walvin argues, however, that this renewed interest in U.S. slavery ignited a global debate that linked police violence worldwide to reminders of social inequity, to statues of imperial generals, and to the wealth garnered by powerful families and institutions from the work of forced laborers. Having argued that statements about the past of slavery and inequality need to be updated, Walvin turns to the historical background underlying the explosion of Black Lives Matter. He begins with World War II, in which people from all over the world fought the Axis powers, after which the inhabitants of colonies were able to claim the rights of national citizens. He acknowledges that the U.S. civil-rights movement of that era performed a similar function: “In the USA, the reconstruction of the Black past lifted slavery out of its essentially regional setting.”
{"title":"A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power by James Walvin","authors":"P. Manning","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01909","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01909","url":null,"abstract":"Walvin’s concise review of slavery in the Atlantic argues that slavery has transformed the West or, indeed, the world to the present day. Chapters in six sections include overviews of Iberian and northern European slave systems, examples from the Middle Passage, slave trade within Brazil and the United States, “managing slavery,” the campaign for freedom, and the argument about the world transformed by slavery—as seen through sugar, tobacco, servile labor, and plantation economies. Walvin’s purpose for writing the book was to restate the history of slavery in support of the discourse around Black Lives Matter. The book’s most original observations are signaled at the opening of the concluding chapter: “The furore which swept round the globe in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in May 2020 brought slavery back into widespread public debate.” In Walvin’s words, “Critics everywhere were swift to point out that the origins of that injustice lay deep in the history of relations between Black and white ... [and] the history of slavery” (331). As he suggests, public discourse turns to history when the issues become most painful and difficult. Walvin argues that the intensity of the reaction to Floyd’s death was reinforced by an earlier debate. “The 1619 Project,” a series published in New York Times Magazine, appeared in 2019 with the 400th anniversary of the delivery of African captives to Virginia. These essays, which reviewed U.S. history through the lens of slavery, prompted heated discussion among Americans of varied backgrounds, but they made virtually no reference to history outside the United States. Walvin argues, however, that this renewed interest in U.S. slavery ignited a global debate that linked police violence worldwide to reminders of social inequity, to statues of imperial generals, and to the wealth garnered by powerful families and institutions from the work of forced laborers. Having argued that statements about the past of slavery and inequality need to be updated, Walvin turns to the historical background underlying the explosion of Black Lives Matter. He begins with World War II, in which people from all over the world fought the Axis powers, after which the inhabitants of colonies were able to claim the rights of national citizens. He acknowledges that the U.S. civil-rights movement of that era performed a similar function: “In the USA, the reconstruction of the Black past lifted slavery out of its essentially regional setting.”","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47147450","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
For several decades, scholars, journalists, and activists have been beavering away to overturn triumphalist narratives regarding the Green Revolution. Earlier generations of observers had generally written positively about the revolution and its leading figures, especially U.S. crop scientist Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.This revolution involved a series of advancements in agriculture between World War II and the late 1980s that led to large increases in cereal grain output—wheat and rice primarily—in various less-developed parts of the world. The increases were the result mainly of the introduction of high-yielding crop varieties (hyvs) used in combination with a technological “package,” marked by increased use of fertilizer, enhanced irrigation works, and, often, greater mechanization.The context for these developments was the perceived need for massive increases in grain production at a time of rapid population growth in already food-insecure parts of the world. The impetus and funding for the Green Revolution must be viewed in the context of the Cold War, as governmental authorities in developed countries devised strategies designed to modernize the agricultural sectors in potentially restive less developed countries (ldcs), thereby lessening the chances of revolutionary upheaval. The preferred instruments for such strategies were crop scientists and development experts, whether working in the public sector—at universities and governmental research facilities—or under the auspices of non-governmental organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Over time, specialized international agricultural research centers emerged to oversee, direct, coordinate, and disseminate “Green Revolution” research. Many of these centers today operate in partnership with an overall coordinating body known as cgiar (Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research).The garden-variety critique of the Green Revolution sees it as a top-down, modernist, and overly technocratic effort orchestrated mainly by “experts” from the developed world that, despite the hype, underperformed in numerous ways almost everywhere it was tried. For example, the increased use of fertilizers and increased importance of irrigation works generally resulted in negative environmental externalities, and the promotion of cereal grains often crowded out production of more nutritious foods. It is alleged that the benefits of the Green Revolution, such as they were, accrued mainly to large commercial farmers who were plugged into agricultural research networks and could afford the necessary “package” of hyvs, fertilizer, irrigation, and mechanized equipment. As a result, rural poverty persisted and undernutrition continued to plague the populations in most areas where the revolution left its mark.The author of this book offers yet another, but different, critical interpretation of the Green Revolution, providing fresh insights to reade
{"title":"<i>The Globalization of Wheat: A Critical History of the Green Revolution</i> by Marci R. Baranski","authors":"Peter A. Coclanis","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01980","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01980","url":null,"abstract":"For several decades, scholars, journalists, and activists have been beavering away to overturn triumphalist narratives regarding the Green Revolution. Earlier generations of observers had generally written positively about the revolution and its leading figures, especially U.S. crop scientist Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.This revolution involved a series of advancements in agriculture between World War II and the late 1980s that led to large increases in cereal grain output—wheat and rice primarily—in various less-developed parts of the world. The increases were the result mainly of the introduction of high-yielding crop varieties (hyvs) used in combination with a technological “package,” marked by increased use of fertilizer, enhanced irrigation works, and, often, greater mechanization.The context for these developments was the perceived need for massive increases in grain production at a time of rapid population growth in already food-insecure parts of the world. The impetus and funding for the Green Revolution must be viewed in the context of the Cold War, as governmental authorities in developed countries devised strategies designed to modernize the agricultural sectors in potentially restive less developed countries (ldcs), thereby lessening the chances of revolutionary upheaval. The preferred instruments for such strategies were crop scientists and development experts, whether working in the public sector—at universities and governmental research facilities—or under the auspices of non-governmental organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Over time, specialized international agricultural research centers emerged to oversee, direct, coordinate, and disseminate “Green Revolution” research. Many of these centers today operate in partnership with an overall coordinating body known as cgiar (Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research).The garden-variety critique of the Green Revolution sees it as a top-down, modernist, and overly technocratic effort orchestrated mainly by “experts” from the developed world that, despite the hype, underperformed in numerous ways almost everywhere it was tried. For example, the increased use of fertilizers and increased importance of irrigation works generally resulted in negative environmental externalities, and the promotion of cereal grains often crowded out production of more nutritious foods. It is alleged that the benefits of the Green Revolution, such as they were, accrued mainly to large commercial farmers who were plugged into agricultural research networks and could afford the necessary “package” of hyvs, fertilizer, irrigation, and mechanized equipment. As a result, rural poverty persisted and undernutrition continued to plague the populations in most areas where the revolution left its mark.The author of this book offers yet another, but different, critical interpretation of the Green Revolution, providing fresh insights to reade","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134981408","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The notion that African bodies survived in hot, wet tropical climates longer and better than European bodies was a cornerstone of white slaveowners’ thought and practice in the Atlantic world. It justified the disproportionate exposure of enslaved African men, women, and children to unhealthy, disease-ridden, and hazardous living and working conditions. This racist doctrine directly contributed to the premature deaths of millions of Black people.Although no serious scholar today openly entertains the idea that race has a material basis in human biology, this book makes clear that historical studies of race and environment have far too often taken at face value the biological rationale of white slaveowners. Studies that test immunity of African- and Creole-born populations to yellow fever and malaria over that of new arrivals from Europe are emblematic of this tendency. These studies unwittingly reinforce the spurious logic of biological race, a notion which assumes an almost transhistorical character of static, unbroken continuity.Johnston’s exciting and timely work forces us to reconsider how we tell histories of race and environment. It reveals that slaveowners and colonial officials repudiated the evidence that environmental and labor conditions, not race, were the primary determinants of death and survival in the tropics. This disavowal facilitated the binary division of Black and white bodies into separate classes of human being, in accordance with a climate-based theory of fixed, immutable racial difference. In the process, the historical development of climatic theories of race over time was effaced and replaced with hollow racial tautologies. To recover this history, Johnston revisits key periods in the expansion of African slavery in the West Indies, colonial Georgia and South Carolina, and the antebellum United States, examining the disjuncture of what contemporaries admitted privately to one another with what they avowed in public forums about the non-racial bases of mortality in plantation colonies.Climatic-racial discourse remained fluid, contested, and amorphous until the early nineteenth century. Whites privately acknowledged in personal correspondence and medical treatises that the survival of newcomers to tropical colonies depended upon “seasoning”—receiving sufficient food, becoming slowly habituated to novel environmental conditions, avoiding the most physically taxing work on plantations—irrespective of race. Observers identified unwise personal habits (such as excessive alcohol consumption) and settlement decisions (such as placing human abodes too close to marshlands and disease-causing miasmas) as more accurate predictors of death for Europeans and Africans equally. It was not uncommon for whites to emphasize that tropical environments were indeed beneficial to the bodily health of Europeans.In public-facing discourse, however, contemporaries appropriated the climatic rhetoric of race to serve the economic imperatives of ca
{"title":"<i>The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World</i> by Katherine Johnston","authors":"Ryan Fontanilla","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01982","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01982","url":null,"abstract":"The notion that African bodies survived in hot, wet tropical climates longer and better than European bodies was a cornerstone of white slaveowners’ thought and practice in the Atlantic world. It justified the disproportionate exposure of enslaved African men, women, and children to unhealthy, disease-ridden, and hazardous living and working conditions. This racist doctrine directly contributed to the premature deaths of millions of Black people.Although no serious scholar today openly entertains the idea that race has a material basis in human biology, this book makes clear that historical studies of race and environment have far too often taken at face value the biological rationale of white slaveowners. Studies that test immunity of African- and Creole-born populations to yellow fever and malaria over that of new arrivals from Europe are emblematic of this tendency. These studies unwittingly reinforce the spurious logic of biological race, a notion which assumes an almost transhistorical character of static, unbroken continuity.Johnston’s exciting and timely work forces us to reconsider how we tell histories of race and environment. It reveals that slaveowners and colonial officials repudiated the evidence that environmental and labor conditions, not race, were the primary determinants of death and survival in the tropics. This disavowal facilitated the binary division of Black and white bodies into separate classes of human being, in accordance with a climate-based theory of fixed, immutable racial difference. In the process, the historical development of climatic theories of race over time was effaced and replaced with hollow racial tautologies. To recover this history, Johnston revisits key periods in the expansion of African slavery in the West Indies, colonial Georgia and South Carolina, and the antebellum United States, examining the disjuncture of what contemporaries admitted privately to one another with what they avowed in public forums about the non-racial bases of mortality in plantation colonies.Climatic-racial discourse remained fluid, contested, and amorphous until the early nineteenth century. Whites privately acknowledged in personal correspondence and medical treatises that the survival of newcomers to tropical colonies depended upon “seasoning”—receiving sufficient food, becoming slowly habituated to novel environmental conditions, avoiding the most physically taxing work on plantations—irrespective of race. Observers identified unwise personal habits (such as excessive alcohol consumption) and settlement decisions (such as placing human abodes too close to marshlands and disease-causing miasmas) as more accurate predictors of death for Europeans and Africans equally. It was not uncommon for whites to emphasize that tropical environments were indeed beneficial to the bodily health of Europeans.In public-facing discourse, however, contemporaries appropriated the climatic rhetoric of race to serve the economic imperatives of ca","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134981409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The 1940s and 1950s are commonly viewed as a transformative period in Turkish history. The era witnessed Turkey’s transition from an authoritarian single-party regime to a multi-party democratic political system, a shift to a model of rapid capitalist economic modernization, and integration into the U.S.-led Western bloc in the early Cold War. The period ended abruptly with a military coup. Whether interpreted as a reversal of the early republic’s secularizing reforms and secular institutions or as a return to more representative Turkish cultural institutions and practices, scholars have considered the late 1940s and 1950s as a time of intense cultural and ideological contestation about Turkish identity and modernity between secular republicans and Islamist conservatives.In this book, Danforth offers an original perspective on 1950s Turkey, arguing that the mid-century was a time when groups articulated differing visions and new syntheses of Turkish modernity, rather than being stuck in a secular authoritarian vs. religious conservatism divide. In doing so, Danforth draws on a wide range of primary sources such as newspapers, magazines, memoirs, literary works, U.S. government documents, and private documents, including former prime minister Bülent Ecevit’s personal papers at the Ecevit Foundation in Ankara.The book is organized thematically, with each one of the seven chapters focusing on a particular aspect relating to Turkish modernity, such as foreign policy, Turkey’s Ottoman past, Turkey’s Arab neighbors, and religious reform. Danforth seeks to provide new interpretations and correctives to the standard accounts of the 1950s by moving beyond the secular vs. religious and the authoritarian rpp (Republican People’s Party) vs. liberal democratic dp (Democratic Party) dichotomies.Danforth is especially interested in understanding the relationship between ideas and politics in Turkey after World War II. This focus is most evident in the first two chapters, where he discusses Turkish and American visions of democracy and modernization within the context of an evolving Turkish-American alignment and American support for the Menderes government in the 1950s. Danforth argues that Turkish intellectuals and politicians quickly adjusted their ideas about democracy and the West in response to changing internal and global circumstances, paralleling altering views of American diplomats to align with American interests.In Chapter 3, Danforth explores the different conceptions of Turkish modernity as articulated by a number of famous and lesser-known writers, journalists, feminists, diplomats, lawyers, and medical doctors in a broad spectrum of publications. Danforth finds a common effort among these authors to overcome and reconcile East-West and similar divides, striving to attain a new synthesis of Turkish modernity. This effort is evident in the alternative visions of modernity expressed by these authors, whether in embracing American modernity over the
关于土耳其与阿拉伯世界的关系，令人感兴趣的是，像外交部长Fuat Köprülü这样的dp政策制定者私下对亲阿拉伯和反英国的立场表示深切关注，而公开支持美国和西方的政策。丹佛斯的结论是，地区和全球地缘政治的现实，而不是文化和历史的亲和力决定了冷战初期的外交政策。最后一章考虑了20世纪50年代记者和伊斯兰学者讨论的伊斯兰教与现代性的兼容性问题。在仔细研究了流行的伊斯兰期刊和杂志(如serdengeti和İslam ' ın Nuru)之后，丹福斯认为，伊斯兰知识分子试图证明伊斯兰教与现代性的兼容性，目标是一种新的综合与和解，而不是对世俗共和国的全面拒绝。当然，正是这种综合与和解的实际条件，使伊斯兰教与世俗意识形态的辩论一直持续到21世纪。对国内和外交政策，以及政治和思想的整体处理，对重新思考20世纪50年代的土耳其非常有帮助，不再仅仅局限于政治、经济或意识形态。清晰的写作风格，丰富多彩的轶事，以及精心挑选的插图，使这本书读起来很愉快，同时也使它更容易为学生和普通读者所接受。作者对第二次世界大战后的土耳其领导人，如门德斯和埃杰维特，以及他们的个性和政治思想进行了重要的揭示。丹福斯对埃杰维特作为一个新兴政治家和知识分子的处理尤其值得称赞。这本书是对20世纪现代性、国家认同和外交政策问题感兴趣的学者的必读读物，不仅在土耳其，而且在全球范围内。
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In this sweeping synthesis, Hämäläinen tells a continental story, one that centers the enduring presence and power of America’s Indigenous peoples across centuries. Pushing back against narratives of declension and erasure, Hämäläinen reminds readers that North America “remained overwhelmingly Indigenous well into the nineteenth century.” Instead of focusing on “colonial America,” he writes “we should speak of an Indigenous America that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial” (ix).The central argument of the book will not surprise readers who are familiar with recent early American historiography. Many scholars have demonstrated that North America remained “Native Ground” for much longer than historians once acknowledged, and many U.S. history textbooks now routinely center Indigenous people in the history of what Wulf dubbed “vast Early America.” Perhaps in the pursuit of reaching a non-scholarly audience, Hämäläinen unfortunately does not directly acknowledge this literature, despite largely relying on some of it for his evidence and argument. He instead casts his argument against the myth that white European colonists rapidly dominated the New World after their arrival.The book struggles to escape the contradiction between its title and subtitle. For as much as the rhetoric of the volume emphasizes the enduring “Indigenous Continent,” the book focuses on the diplomatic events and military battles that ultimately tilted the balance of power in this “epic contest for North America.” The story of resistance and dispossession unfolds without equal attention to who was resisting or what was being dispossessed. As the volume proceeds, its geographic scope shrinks, the contest becomes increasingly defined by the dominance of the United States, and the “Indigenous Continent” becomes less continental.Hämäläinen resolves this contradiction in a way that pushes back on one of the major trends of recent Indigenous history. Whereas a generation of scholars has detailed how North America remained Indigenous space long after the nineteenth century, Hämäläinen describes a world where Native Americans gradually lost their power in a westward fashion. The volume even ends roughly when the census revealed to Frederick Jackson Turner that the frontier had closed. Exceptions like the discussion of the Pueblo Revolt disrupt the Turnerian feel, and Hämäläinen describes prolonged and successful Indigenous resistance as he carries the narrative west (183–186). These discussions, though, ultimately leave no space to explore the enduring power or presence of Indigenous people. The Eastern Woodlands, for instance, appear near the start of the volume but the Powhatans and various Algonquian speakers receive little attention after the eighteenth century. Indian Removal cuts the story of the southeast off in the 1830s, with the Cherokees and other Native Southerners hardly appearing at all afterward. The story on the Plains similarly comes to an all-too-familiar end
在这个全面的综合中，Hämäläinen讲述了一个大陆故事，一个以美国土著民族几个世纪以来持久存在和力量为中心的故事。Hämäläinen反驳了衰落和抹去的叙述，提醒读者北美“直到19世纪仍以绝大多数土著居民为主”。他写道，“我们应该谈论一个只是缓慢而不均匀地成为殖民地的土著美洲”，而不是关注“殖民美洲”。这本书的中心论点不会让熟悉美国近代早期史学的读者感到惊讶。许多学者已经证明，北美保持“土著土地”的时间比历史学家曾经承认的要长得多，许多美国历史教科书现在经常把土著居民放在伍尔夫所谓的“广阔的早期美洲”历史的中心。也许是为了达到非学术读者的目的，Hämäläinen不幸地没有直接承认这些文献，尽管在很大程度上依赖其中的一些作为他的证据和论点。相反，他反驳了欧洲白人殖民者抵达新大陆后迅速统治新大陆的神话。这本书努力避免标题和副标题之间的矛盾。尽管这本书的修辞强调了持久的“土著大陆”，但这本书关注的是最终在这场“北美史诗竞赛”中改变力量平衡的外交事件和军事战斗。反抗和被剥夺的故事展开时，没有同等的关注是谁在反抗，什么被剥夺。随着这本书的出版，它的地理范围缩小了，这场竞争越来越被美国的主导地位所界定，“土著大陆”变得越来越少continental.Hämäläinen以一种方式解决了这一矛盾，它推翻了最近土著历史的一个主要趋势。尽管一代学者详细描述了19世纪后北美如何长期保持土著空间，但Hämäläinen描述了一个美洲原住民逐渐以西进方式失去权力的世界。当人口普查向弗雷德里克·杰克逊·特纳(Frederick Jackson Turner)透露边境已经关闭时，这一卷甚至大致结束了。像普韦布洛起义的讨论这样的例外打破了特纳的感觉，Hämäläinen在他向西叙述的过程中描述了长期而成功的土著抵抗(183-186)。然而，这些讨论最终没有留下空间来探索土著人民的持久力量或存在。例如，东部林地出现在卷的开头，但波瓦坦人和各种阿尔冈昆语使用者在18世纪之后很少受到关注。《印第安人的迁徙》在19世纪30年代切断了东南部的故事，切罗基人和其他南方原住民在那之后几乎没有出现过。大平原上的故事也有一个非常熟悉的结局。本质上，土著大陆被埋葬在伤膝。有时，史诗般的规模和有限的资源基础使得Hämäläinen写出了一篇3000英里宽、一英寸深的叙事，其中充斥着令人眼花缭乱的散文，其中充满了奇怪的观察。例如，有些结论将土著背景简单化了。例如，读者了解到“在北美[在与欧洲接触之前]，领导人不是发号施令和胁迫臣民的独裁者。相反，他们是努力达成共识的仲裁者和调解人”(23)。类似的智力怪癖和疏漏在其他地方也存在。例如，研究南方土著的学者会注意到，没有埃斯里奇和关于破碎地带的著作，也没有哈德逊关于索托和entradas的经典著作因此，这本书对该地区人口减少的描述比最近学者们所断言的要快得多，也要彻底得多。同样，在他的“长期迁移时代”一章中，作者莫名其妙地忽略了里德在这一主题上的开创性工作，而这一工作正是这一章的标题所呼应的里德作品的遗漏导致了一种令人吃惊的突然的强迫搬迁的叙述;Hämäläinen开始讨论太迟了，没有提到搬迁后印第安领土或东部的生活。尽管存在这些缺点，Hämäläinen提供了一个非常需要的术语，描述了整个大陆上土著人民的持久存在和力量。虽然这个想法并不新鲜，但学者和其他人可能会借用这个有用的术语，并在未来几年提到“土著大陆”。因此，它将被广泛阅读，很可能被指定，很可能被引用，作为一种文学的象征，而它并没有完全反映出来。
{"title":"<i>Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America</i> by Pekka Hämäläinen","authors":"Andrew K. Frank","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01996","url":null,"abstract":"In this sweeping synthesis, Hämäläinen tells a continental story, one that centers the enduring presence and power of America’s Indigenous peoples across centuries. Pushing back against narratives of declension and erasure, Hämäläinen reminds readers that North America “remained overwhelmingly Indigenous well into the nineteenth century.” Instead of focusing on “colonial America,” he writes “we should speak of an Indigenous America that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial” (ix).The central argument of the book will not surprise readers who are familiar with recent early American historiography. Many scholars have demonstrated that North America remained “Native Ground” for much longer than historians once acknowledged, and many U.S. history textbooks now routinely center Indigenous people in the history of what Wulf dubbed “vast Early America.” Perhaps in the pursuit of reaching a non-scholarly audience, Hämäläinen unfortunately does not directly acknowledge this literature, despite largely relying on some of it for his evidence and argument. He instead casts his argument against the myth that white European colonists rapidly dominated the New World after their arrival.The book struggles to escape the contradiction between its title and subtitle. For as much as the rhetoric of the volume emphasizes the enduring “Indigenous Continent,” the book focuses on the diplomatic events and military battles that ultimately tilted the balance of power in this “epic contest for North America.” The story of resistance and dispossession unfolds without equal attention to who was resisting or what was being dispossessed. As the volume proceeds, its geographic scope shrinks, the contest becomes increasingly defined by the dominance of the United States, and the “Indigenous Continent” becomes less continental.Hämäläinen resolves this contradiction in a way that pushes back on one of the major trends of recent Indigenous history. Whereas a generation of scholars has detailed how North America remained Indigenous space long after the nineteenth century, Hämäläinen describes a world where Native Americans gradually lost their power in a westward fashion. The volume even ends roughly when the census revealed to Frederick Jackson Turner that the frontier had closed. Exceptions like the discussion of the Pueblo Revolt disrupt the Turnerian feel, and Hämäläinen describes prolonged and successful Indigenous resistance as he carries the narrative west (183–186). These discussions, though, ultimately leave no space to explore the enduring power or presence of Indigenous people. The Eastern Woodlands, for instance, appear near the start of the volume but the Powhatans and various Algonquian speakers receive little attention after the eighteenth century. Indian Removal cuts the story of the southeast off in the 1830s, with the Cherokees and other Native Southerners hardly appearing at all afterward. The story on the Plains similarly comes to an all-too-familiar end","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134981579","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Oakland, California, situated across the bay from San Francisco, is the quintessential second city. It is, depending on the metaphor of choice, in the shadow of, little sibling to, or the grittier neighbor of its more celebrated urban counterpart. But those metaphors—to say nothing of the greatest cliché of all, Gertrude Stein’s “there is no there there” dismissal of the city—grew outworn long ago. Oakland is a city like any other, deserving of its own history and commentary, independent from constant comparison with San Francisco.Schwarzer offers just such a history in this rollicking, sprawling compendium of, in the words of its subtitle, the development and disruption of Oakland from the 1890s to the present. Focusing on the built environment, this book is primarily about parks, automobiles, highways, and housing, with some mass transit, shopping centers, and urban renewal alongside. It is organized accordingly, with chapters such as “Streetcar Stratification,” “The Politics of Parks,” “Housing Injustice,” and so forth. Schwarzer has read just about everything ever written about Oakland—so it would seem—and he synthesizes a narrative that is both familiar to urban historians and capable of occasional surprises and enchantments.The book’s two chief attributes are its fidelity to Oakland, and to cities generally, as a site of constant creative destruction and its empirical detail. A massive interregional system of streetcar lines was barely up and running before it was outdated, its private business model and fixed tracks supplanted by the public financing of roads and highways and the unfixed ambit of the automobile, truck, and bus. Downtown Oakland suffered from disinvestment and the effects of regional decentralization and subsequently turned to federal urban renewal as a lifeboat—before creeping gentrification saved it in the twenty-first century.That these stories of development and disruption are relatively familiar to urban scholars—as are the many other stories found in the book, of sports arenas, highway construction, housing segregation, commercial decentralization, deindustrialization, and so on—does not diminish their importance here. What is more, Schwarzer tackles them with an attention to empirical detail and specificity that will please even the most demanding local historian. Close readers will also find gems in those details. “The City of Oakland never fashioned a grand and accessible urban park, akin to Golden Gate Park,” Schwarzer writes, not because of a dearth of design plans (the noted urban planner Charles Mulford Robinson penned such a recommendation in his 1906 A Plan for Civic Improvement for the City of Oakland, California) but because of city council dithering (117). To this day, the best local parks are operated by the East Bay Regional Park District, a cooperative endeavor of Alameda and Contra Coast Counties, not the City of Oakland.For all its exhaustive research and factual detail, this often feels like a book i
位于旧金山海湾对面的加州奥克兰是典型的第二大城市。根据选择的隐喻，它是在其更著名的城市对手的阴影下，或者是兄弟姐妹，或者是更坚韧的邻居。但这些隐喻——更不用说最老套的，格特鲁德·斯坦(Gertrude Stein)对城市的“那里没有那里”(there is no there)——早就过时了。奥克兰是一个和其他城市一样的城市，值得拥有自己的历史和评论，独立于与旧金山的不断比较。施瓦泽在这本喧闹的、庞大的概要中提供了这样一段历史，用副标题的话说，奥克兰从19世纪90年代到现在的发展和破坏。本书关注建筑环境，主要是关于公园、汽车、高速公路和住房，以及一些公共交通、购物中心和城市更新。这本书的组织方式与之相应，包括“有轨电车分层”、“公园政治”、“住房不公”等章节。施瓦泽几乎读过所有关于奥克兰的文章——看起来是这样——他综合的叙述既为城市历史学家所熟悉，又能偶尔带来惊喜和魅力。这本书的两个主要特点是忠实于奥克兰，以及一般的城市，作为一个不断创造性破坏的场所，以及它的经验细节。一个庞大的跨区域有轨电车系统刚刚建成并开始运行，就已经过时了，它的私人商业模式和固定轨道被道路和高速公路的公共融资以及汽车、卡车和公共汽车的不固定范围所取代。奥克兰市中心遭受了投资减少和地区分权的影响，随后转向联邦城市重建作为一艘救生艇，直到21世纪缓慢的中产阶级化拯救了它。这些关于发展和破坏的故事对于城市学者来说相对熟悉——就像书中发现的许多其他故事一样，关于运动场、高速公路建设、住房隔离、商业分散、去工业化等等——但这并没有降低它们在这里的重要性。更重要的是，施瓦泽在处理这些问题时，注重经验细节和特殊性，即使是最苛刻的当地历史学家也会感到高兴。细心的读者也会在这些细节中发现瑰宝。“奥克兰市从来没有像金门公园那样建立一个宏伟的、可进入的城市公园，”施瓦泽写道，这并不是因为缺乏设计方案(著名的城市规划师查尔斯·马尔福德·罗宾逊在他1906年的《加州奥克兰市公民改善计划》中就提出了这样的建议)，而是因为市议会的犹豫不决(117)。直到今天，当地最好的公园都是由东湾地区公园区(East Bay Regional Park District)运营的，这是阿拉米达县和康特拉海岸县的合作，而不是奥克兰市。尽管有详尽的研究和事实细节，但这本书经常让人感觉像是在寻找论文。发展和颠覆只能带我们走这么远;它们一直是城市化的必要条件。奥克兰作为交通枢纽也太过笼统:哪个大城市的起源不能追溯到某种节点网络呢?施瓦泽在前言中写道，这本书关注的是“新兴的交通技术和系统性的种族主义如何配置进入城市化土地的途径”(5)。这是一个潜在的紧迫争论的萌芽。但事实上，种族在他的分析中起着微不足道的作用，直到最后几章，特别是关于住房的一章，他所说的“获得城市化土地”的含义(由谁、在什么条件下、为了什么目的)从未得到有意义的定义或发展。最后，尽管这本书有很多优点，但它更像百科全书，而不是分析性的。这是一次迷人的、旋风式的旅行，穿越了近一个半世纪的城市动荡。非城市主义者和湾区爱好者可能会发现它的内容丰富，引人入胜的章节可读性和魅力。我怀疑，研究城市生活的跨学科学者们，在施瓦泽驾驭熟悉的现代美国城市主义领域时，会错过一个强有力的分析框架。
{"title":"<i>Hella Town: Oakland’s History of Development and Disruption</i> by Mitchell Schwarzer","authors":"Robert O. Self","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01993","url":null,"abstract":"Oakland, California, situated across the bay from San Francisco, is the quintessential second city. It is, depending on the metaphor of choice, in the shadow of, little sibling to, or the grittier neighbor of its more celebrated urban counterpart. But those metaphors—to say nothing of the greatest cliché of all, Gertrude Stein’s “there is no there there” dismissal of the city—grew outworn long ago. Oakland is a city like any other, deserving of its own history and commentary, independent from constant comparison with San Francisco.Schwarzer offers just such a history in this rollicking, sprawling compendium of, in the words of its subtitle, the development and disruption of Oakland from the 1890s to the present. Focusing on the built environment, this book is primarily about parks, automobiles, highways, and housing, with some mass transit, shopping centers, and urban renewal alongside. It is organized accordingly, with chapters such as “Streetcar Stratification,” “The Politics of Parks,” “Housing Injustice,” and so forth. Schwarzer has read just about everything ever written about Oakland—so it would seem—and he synthesizes a narrative that is both familiar to urban historians and capable of occasional surprises and enchantments.The book’s two chief attributes are its fidelity to Oakland, and to cities generally, as a site of constant creative destruction and its empirical detail. A massive interregional system of streetcar lines was barely up and running before it was outdated, its private business model and fixed tracks supplanted by the public financing of roads and highways and the unfixed ambit of the automobile, truck, and bus. Downtown Oakland suffered from disinvestment and the effects of regional decentralization and subsequently turned to federal urban renewal as a lifeboat—before creeping gentrification saved it in the twenty-first century.That these stories of development and disruption are relatively familiar to urban scholars—as are the many other stories found in the book, of sports arenas, highway construction, housing segregation, commercial decentralization, deindustrialization, and so on—does not diminish their importance here. What is more, Schwarzer tackles them with an attention to empirical detail and specificity that will please even the most demanding local historian. Close readers will also find gems in those details. “The City of Oakland never fashioned a grand and accessible urban park, akin to Golden Gate Park,” Schwarzer writes, not because of a dearth of design plans (the noted urban planner Charles Mulford Robinson penned such a recommendation in his 1906 A Plan for Civic Improvement for the City of Oakland, California) but because of city council dithering (117). To this day, the best local parks are operated by the East Bay Regional Park District, a cooperative endeavor of Alameda and Contra Coast Counties, not the City of Oakland.For all its exhaustive research and factual detail, this often feels like a book i","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134981417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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