California and the New Suburban History

Abstract

United States labor and urban history have of late enjoyed a compelling relationship. Each has drawn from the other, and though at times the borrowing has felt unsatisfying, it has also produced moments of deep mutual engagement. Becky Nicolaides's My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 embraces the best of this scholarly trend. Nicolaides raises the bar in the dialogue between urbanists and labor historians by combining a study of working-class culture and economic life with a study of city building and suburbanization. The result is a dense and provocative local history of suburban California politics that illuminates the origins of the rightward turn in postwar national political culture. Nicolaides goes where few urbanists have yet to tread—into the suburban bungalows of the nation's housing boom in the fifties and sixties—to recover the ideological and material foundations of suburbanization as a place-centered process. At the same time, My Blue Heaven raises a set of questions about the historiographical boundaries that divide labor, urban, and African American history. 1