Mary P. Ryan. Taking the Land to Make the City: A Bicoastal History of North America.

Abstract

In this Taking the Land to Make the City: A Bicoastal History of North America, Mary P. Ryan generously shares her deep knowledge of the emergence of Baltimore and San Francisco, two storied cities she has studied long and well. The two might seem to make an unlikely pairing, but there is much value in examining them together, thanks to their similarities as well as their differences. As Ryan points out, both Baltimore and San Francisco are coastal cities in unusually fertile ecological zones. They are younger and more contemporary with each other than one might first guess. Baltimore’s site was not set until 1796, making it the first major post-Revolutionary city in the United States. San Francisco was more uncertainly established in 1834, thirteen years after Mexico broke free from Spain. While Ryan traces the two sites’ geological histories and the rich, though quite different, Native American life each supported long before the arrival of Europeans, her main interest is in how people on the ground in both places launched the modern cities in a remarkably brief and tumultuous period of time. Working in an active tradition of historiography that begins with Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1974), Ryan masterfully conveys to the reader her fascination with how urban environments as complex as these two came into being. Her subtitle relates to her assertion that an understanding of this process provides a fresh vantage point from which to explore North American history more generally.