Boom Town Research Articles

Violence, intimacy and veins of madness in a fraught border city

AbstractThis article considers the intimate, the violent and the psychopathological in Bukavu, an eastern Congolese border city known for rape and war. A phenomenological focus pries open tensions in this ruinous, neoliberal ‘boom town’, frictions related to mental health, patterns of resort, and derangement. Ethnographic portraits from co-produced fieldnotes reveal family and street dynamics and a few adaptive, public figures of madness. Bukavu knows unhinged, delirious, psychotic people and PTSD infrastructures in this ‘trauma zone’. Patterns of psychosis go with ‘vivacity’, a Foucauldian word. The non-scientific term madness points to politics and the everyday, with many mad persons roaming the streets with performances. Intimacy enables rethinking this city, where ways of telling and knowing madness speak to agitation, kinship, strangeness and ordinary matters of sleep, dress and faecal matter.

CODEVI: translating cross-border challenges into value creation?

Learning outcomes This case study was intended for MBA/postgraduate level courses, or for high-level executive courses. It provided a complex international business context to analyse the intricacies and dependencies between emerging regions, wherein a company (Grupo M) established an entire manufacturing cluster and invested all its assets in a place that has never hosted any industrial activity – in a country whose culture and traditions differed significantly from those of the neighbouring country that provided the investment. The case included a discussion of the negotiations that a private company undertook with two governments (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) to secure access to the free-zone facilities granted by the importing countries. The case could be seen as a stimulating international business context to examine central tenets around “shared value creation” (Porter and Kramer, 2011): the practice of creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges. As per these authors, there are three ways to create shared value: by reconceiving products and markets, by redefining productivity in the value chain and by enabling local cluster development. The latter is the one best exemplified in this case. Additionally, the case brought intriguing insights on international business that can be related to ethics, corporate social responsibility and its many facets (Banerjee, 2007), as well as concepts around “responsible lobbying” (Anastasiadis et al., 2018). Case overview/synopsis This case presented the expansion challenges of CODEVI, a Dominican company, which established and operated an industrial (free zone) park in Haiti. Grupo M decided to move its operations when The World Trade Organization eliminated the quota system for apparel imported from the Far East Countries, and its CEO, Fernando Capellán, foresaw that the Dominican Republic would soon become non-competitive. At the time, an agreement between the US and Haiti, which gave preferential access to production from this extremely poor country, was being negotiated. In 2003, there were two sleepy towns at the Haitian-Dominican border: Dajabón, with about 18,000 inhabitants in the Dominican side, and Ounaminthe in Haiti, with about 40,000 inhabitants (with 90 per cent unemployment and over 80 per cent living below the extreme poverty line) on the Haitan side. These two locations were at the heart of a case that narrated how a complex international business operation resulted in an industrial park that has enjoyed considerable economic success, while simultaneously improving dramatically the living conditions of both border towns: Dajabón now has about 35,000 inhabitants and was a booming town, with a prosperous middle class; Ounaminthe now had 170,000 inhabitants (17,000 work directly at CODEVI), and was a city that essentially remained outside the chaos that often plagues the rest of Haiti. Additionally, a major impact of CODEVI was that it stopped the area’s illegal emigration of Haitians to the Dominican Republic, one of the Dominican Republic’s most pressing problems. But as the CODEVI industrial park has no area to expand, a decision must be made to either expand next to the present park, or at one of the three sister towns along the border. Such a park would have to be built from nothing, as was the case for CODEVI almost two decades ago. Complexity academic level MBA, executive and postgraduate. Supplementary materials Teaching notes are available for educators only. Subject code CSS 5: International Business.

Conrad Seabaugh & Company: An Inside Look at an Illinois Hinterland Merchant

Conrad Seabaugh & Company: An Inside Look at an Illinois Hinterland Merchant

The Fishmeal Revolution: The Industrialization of the Humboldt Current by Kristin A. Wintersteen

Reviewed by: The Fishmeal Revolution: The Industrialization of the Humboldt Current by Kristin A. Wintersteen Kellen Backer (bio) The Fishmeal Revolution: The Industrialization of the Humboldt Current By Kristin A. Wintersteen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021. Pp. 246. Kristin Wintersteen's The Fishmeal Revolution tells a transnational story linking the fish of the Humboldt Current to the global food supply. Situated in the Pacific, off the western coast of South America, the Humboldt Current's constant churn of nutrients sustains fish that served as fodder for industrialized meat production in the second half of the twentieth century. Wintersteen's monograph gives both a very broad overview, looking into the longer history of the current from "deep time" to the present, as well as a narrower history of fishing boom towns in Chile and Peru. The story is both local, national, and international, as Wintersteen follows science, capital, regulations, and fishmeal across the world. The Humboldt Current supports a plethora of fish, particularly anchovetas and sardines, small fish that can be made into fishmeal and fish oil. At times, the current supports enormous schools of fish, something naturalists and the people living in the region have long noticed, though climactic events like El Niño dramatically shape fish availability. While many aquatic creatures thrive in the current, the smaller species of fish, which were less desirable as food, became useful in creating products that provided nutrients for the industrialized production of chickens, hogs, and even farmed fish. And yet, few consumers know of the linkages between the ocean and their dinner. After providing a long history of the Humboldt Current and a background to the industrial uses of fish products from 1840–1930, Wintersteen looks closer at the history of the region's fishing industries. Starting in the 1950s, the fishmeal industry exploded in Chile and Peru, and fish from the Humboldt Current likely supplied over half of the world's fish-meal from 1950–2010 (p. 5). Wintersteen follows the rise of fishmeal and fish oil production in Chile and Peru, focusing on how local and global science, capital, regulations, and cultures shaped the nascent fishing and fish processing industries. The differing histories of fishmeal production in Peru and Chile offer a compelling story of the impact of state regulations, technology, and the environment. The Peruvian industry focused on fishing for anchoveta, particularly in the boom town of Chimbote, while Chile's fishing industry utilized several species of fish. The transnational comparison between Peru and Chile is highly useful [End Page 589] for understanding the rise of local industry, the role of national governments in shaping fishing industries, and how various places responded to ecological crises. In many ways, Wintersteen's story bears a remarkable resemblance to histories of mining, with its boom and bust towns. The fish-meal trade, however, dependent on fish, faced very different challenges in predicting outputs and managing resources, particularly in a region where events like El Niño altered ecosystems. The dramatic changes in oceanic life and differing responses in Chile and Peru, also under various governments, offer lessons for dealing with environmental crises. To tell this story, Wintersteen draws on an impressive array of evidence from archives in eight countries, including corporate, government, and scientific sources that paint a multi-level, transnational picture of fishing, regulations, and industry. Wintersteen argues that the story of the region is "translocal," and by utilizing such diverse sources, the monograph highlights many interconnections between different places. With such a broad focus, many topics are left out, including a close analysis of fish processing and the uses of fishmeal in industrialized food production. Technology's role in the story is mentioned briefly, such as in the histories of nylon nets or the use of steam to create fishmeal. While the focus on multiple sites helps to make the story translocal, many parts of the history are therefore very short. The Fishmeal Revolution will appeal to many scholars, particularly those interested in envirotechnical history and transnational history. Scholars interested in scientific uncertainty, particularly around the environment, will learn much from this volume. By telling a story that includes businesses, fishers, scientific researchers, and government officials across the globe...

Jeffrey L. Gould. Solidarity under Siege: The Salvadoran Labor Movement, 1970–1990.

Jeffrey L. Gould’s Solidarity under Siege: The Salvadoran Labor Movement, 1970–1990 is a fine-grained study of the working people at the heart of a little-known entrepreneurial success story in El Salvador when shrimp exports after 1960 came to generate one-third of the country’s export revenue and the port of El Triunfo swelled to over five thousand residents in 1970. This boom town proved an island of relative prosperity and peacefulness during the slide into an epic of popular insurgency, radical activism, and counterrevolutionary violence which saw eight thousand to eleven thousand civilians killed in 1980 alone (9). While facing arrests, raids, deaths, and threats, local unionists were spared large-scale killing because businesses and the military were making money while rebels and refugees used the port as a place of shelter and recuperation (21). “Among the more privileged in the country,” local workers were “politically conservative, sympathetic to management, and hostile...

Boom Town Business Dynamics

The U.S. shale oil and gas boom provides a unique opportunity to study economic growth in a “boom town” environment, derive insights about labor market expansions more generally, and identify the causal effects of economic growth on specific margins of business adjustment. Creation of new establishments—separate from expansion of existing establishments—accounts for a disproportionate share of the multi-industry employment growth sparked by the shale boom, an intuitive but not inevitable empirical result that is consistent with models of firm dynamics. New firms, in particular, contribute nearly half of the cumulative employment growth resulting from the shale boom.

Building Cultural Heritage Resilience through Remote Sensing: An Integrated Approach Using Multi-Temporal Site Monitoring, Datafication, and Web-GL Visualization

In the American West, wildfires and earthquakes are increasingly threatening the archaeological, historical, and tribal resources that define the collective identity and connection with the past for millions of Americans. The loss of said resources diminishes societal understanding of the role cultural heritage plays in shaping our present and future. This paper examines the viability of employing stationary and SLAM-based terrestrial laser scanning, close-range photogrammetry, automated surface change detection, GIS, and WebGL visualization techniques to enhance the preservation of cultural resources in California. Our datafication approach combines multi-temporal remote sensing monitoring of historic features with legacy data and collaborative visualization to document and evaluate how environmental threats affect built heritage. We tested our methodology in response to recent environmental threats from wildfire and earthquakes at Bodie, an iconic Gold Rush-era boom town located on the California and Nevada border. Our multi-scale results show that the proposed approach effectively integrates highly accurate 3D snapshots of Bodie’s historic buildings before/after disturbance, or post-restoration, with surface change detection and online collaborative visualization of 3D geospatial data to monitor and preserve important cultural resources at the site. This study concludes that the proposed workflow enhances the monitoring of at-risk California’s cultural heritage and makes a call to action to employ remote sensing as a pathway to advanced planning.

Steady Habits in the Constitution State: Connecticut's Inequitable System of Representation, 1639–1965

Steady Habits in the Constitution State: Connecticut's Inequitable System of Representation, 1639–1965

“Ghost cities” versus boom towns: Do China's high-speed rail new towns thrive?

In China, local governments often build “new towns” far from the city center but close to new high-speed rail (HSR) stations. While some HSR new towns experience economic growth, others have been vacant for years and become “ghost cities.” This study explores the determinants of this heterogeneity. Using satellite imagery and online archives of government documents, we identify 180 HSR new towns. We use several datasets to measure local economic growth at a fine spatial scale. Building on the recent economic geography literature, we implement an instrumental variable strategy and a difference-in-differences approach that estimates the treatment effect with counterfactual locations to study how the creation of a new HSR station stimulates local economic growth. We find that the location and local market access are key determinants of the success of new towns. “Ghost cities” are more likely to emerge if the new stations are located too far from the existing city center or the city itself has weak market access.

Boom Town Business Dynamics

The shale oil and gas boom in the U.S. provides a unique opportunity to study economic growth in a "boom town" environment, to derive insights about economic expansions more generally, and to obtain clean identification of the causal effects of economic growth on specific margins of business adjustment. The creation of new business establishments--separate from the expansion of existing establishments--accounts for a disproportionate share of the multi-industry employment growth sparked by the shale boom, an intuitive but not inevitable empirical result that is broadly consistent with canonical models of firm dynamics. New firms, in particular, contribute nearly half of the cumulative economic growth resulting from the shale boom.

Ciudad Juárez: Saga of a Legendary Border City by Oscar J. Martínez

Reviewed by: Ciudad Juárez: Saga of a Legendary Border City by Oscar J. Martínez William F. Manger Ciudad Juárez: Saga of a Legendary Border City. Oscar J. Martínez. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018. Pp. xi+330, photographs, tables, appendix, bibliography, notes, index. $90.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-8165-3721-1. $29.95, paperback, ISBN 978-0-8165-3722-8. Mexican border cities have long had an "unsavory reputation" in the United States and even interior Mexico (x). North of the border they are often associated with vice tourism, undocumented migration, the loss of factory jobs, drug trafficking, and violence. This is particularly true of Ciudad Juárez, the oldest and largest border city, which is the focus of historian Oscar Martínez's book, Ciudad Juárez: Saga of a Legendary Border City. Martínez, who grew up in Juárez, attended school in El Paso, and taught at the University of Texas at El Paso for many years, is the consummate guide to the economic and social history of Juárez and reminds readers that, as Mexico's sixth largest city, it also "represents a vibrant community" (4). This work expands on the author's first book, Border Boom Town: Ciudad Juárez since 1848, a classic in border studies published in 1978 [End Page 161] (University of Texas Press). The first seven chapters of the original work have been significantly revised using more recent publications and primary documents from both sides of the border. Moreover, the author broadens his discussion of illegal activities prior to 1980, and particularly the illicit trade in drugs, in an effort to better understand "the origin and evolution of the extraordinary lawlessness" that has beset Juárez and other border cities in recent decades (6). The book also has three additional chapters (ch. 8–10) that chronicle events from the past forty years emphasizing the rapid growth of the maquiladora industry, the international drug trade, and the unwieldy expansion of the city and its population since 1980. The first seven chapters focus on the major themes in Border Boom Town, including the impact of the railroads, the push for a free trade zone, the Mexican Revolution, Prohibition, the Great Depression, World War II, and the expansion of the city's commercial and industrial sectors in the 1960s. They further emphasize the boom-and-bust cycles that adversely impacted the city and its residents following the arrival of railroads in the early 1880s and Juárez's increasing dependence on its twin city across the river. The exception to this was the years between 1885 and 1905, when a zona libre (free zone) was established along the border, and Juárez came to surpass El Paso economically. Following the elimination of the free zone, however, tourism increasingly served as the basis of its economy, leading to a growing external orientation. This further expanded with the enactment of Prohibition in 1919 when Juárez and other border cities turned to vice tourism and experienced a rise in smuggling and the international drug trade. The city was severely impacted by the end of Prohibition in 1933, however, as many saloons and gambling houses, along with other related businesses, closed or relocated north of the border. The city's reliance on tourism ended in the 1960s with the initiation of the National Border Program (PRONAF) in 1961 and the Border Industrialization Program (BIP) in 1965, which promoted industrialization through foreign-owned assembly plants known as maquiladoras. The goal of the former program was to expand the city's commercial and industrial sectors and reduce residents' reliance on El Paso for their shopping needs, while BIP sought to alleviate the high rates of unemployment. Juárez became the leading center for the maquiladora industry, [End Page 162] but the expansion of domestic industry was never fully realized as residents continued to spend much of their income in El Paso. The final three chapters focus on the post-1980 period, when Juárez "solidified its position as the maquiladora capital of Mexico" (147). Low wages and peso devaluations, however, resulted in a decline in the standard of living for workers. By the end...

Guadalupe Mountains National Park: An Environmental History of the Southwest Borderlands by Jeffrey P. Shepherd

Reviewed by: Guadalupe Mountains National Park: An Environmental History of the Southwest Borderlands by Jeffrey P. Shepherd Glen Sample Ely Guadalupe Mountains National Park: An Environmental History of the Southwest Borderlands. By Jeffrey P. Shepherd. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. Pp. 227. Notes, index.) Jeffrey Shepherd’s instructive environmental history is a valuable resource for anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding of the Guadalupe Mountains, its fragile, arid ecosystem, and how humans have interacted with and impacted their environment over the millennia. Guadalupe Mountains National Park, located in Texas, is smaller than 90,000 acres. Confronted with such a limited geographical area, Shepherd frames his narrative within the larger context of the Southwest Borderlands. His focus is a zone bounded by Roswell, New Mexico, 135 miles to the north, the Pecos River, sixty-five miles to the east, and El Paso, Texas, 115 miles to the west and south. After introducing the geology, flora, and fauna of the Guadalupes, the author moves to the area’s first inhabitants, who lived here more than 10,000 years ago. Next are Spanish exploration and settlement of the region during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Following the U.S.–Mexico War, the United States sent topographic engineers to explore the Trans-Pecos region, including the Guadalupe Mountains, home of the highest point in Texas. These explorations, combined with railroad surveys during the 1850s, greatly expanded the existing knowledge of the area’s geography, natural resources, and inhabitants. Shepherd’s discussion of the Mescalero Apaches, their cultural lifeways, and the U.S. Army’s military engagements with this tribe, is a highlight. By the 1880s, the Southern Pacific and Texas and Pacific railways spanned West Texas, spurring area development and settlement. Soon vast cattle herds were grazing regional grasslands, and farmers were irrigating crops from the Pecos River. Another of the book’s standout chapters features gritty profiles of early homesteaders and settlers, scrappy men and women who adapted to their stark, remote environs. In the 1920s and 1930s, a flurry of oil exploration transformed West Texas and southern New Mexico. Conservation of the region’s outstanding scenic and environmental assets came later than in other parts of the Southwest, finally gaining traction with the establishment of Guadalupe Mountains National Park in 1966. [End Page 463] In widening his lens to focus on a larger study area, however, Shepherd overlooks some of the more important environmental concerns closer to home in the Guadalupes. One issue is the significant degradation and desertification of area grasslands by livestock overgrazing. Another is water. For the past sixty years, agricultural concerns in Dell City, located on the west side of the park, have aggressively pumped the Bone Spring-Victorio Peak Aquifer. This has lowered the water table on average by thirty feet, drying up significant, historic water sources such as Crow Spring. In addition, the city of El Paso is actively buying up water rights in the region to ensure its continued growth. How will all of this affect the Guadalupes? Discussions of nearby oil boom towns such as Mentone and Orla are absent from Shepherd’s story, as are the current environmental impacts of the Permian shale boom on the Guadalupe Mountains, including area work camps, heavy truck traffic, and considerable nighttime light pollution from Orla. There are also big changes in land ownership. The park’s immediate neighbor to the south is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns 400,000 acres and has built a space-rocket launching port on the old Figure 2 Ranch and adjacent land. These points notwithstanding, Shepherd’s thoughtful and informative work of the Guadalupe Mountains is a welcome addition to the growing historiography on the Texas Trans-Pecos. Glen Sample Ely Grand Junction, Colorado Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association

Roosevelt's Populism: The Kansas Oil War of 1905 and the Making of Corporate Capitalism

AbstractThe map of the American petroleum industry shifted rapidly from the Northeast to the Southwest at the turn of the twentieth century when spectacular gushers were struck first in Texas and soon in California, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The flood of small and mid-size oil producers broke the hold that the Standard Oil Company had for decades held on the industry. Competition defeated monopoly. Or so the conventional story goes. This article offers a more complicated narrative by focusing on conflicts between Standard Oil and independent producers in the booming towns of southeast Kansas in 1904 and 1905. In those years, John D. Rockefeller's firm established a monopoly through technologies of distribution and distillation and the production of scientific knowledge and opaque classifications of commodities. Oil producers revolted. A reform movement turned to the rhetoric and policy ideas of Populism as it sought to use state power to challenge the stranglehold of the “octopus.” This article explores the previously unrecognized significance of this movement by showing how the Kansas oil war contributed to the breakup of Standard Oil by the Supreme Court in 1911 and constituted one of the bottom-up sources for the reconstruction of American capitalism.

Stephen H. Rigby, Boston 1086–1225: A Medieval Boom Town. Lincoln: The Society of Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, 2017. xii + 136pp. 34 figures. 6 maps. Bibliography. Glossary. £12.50 pbk.

Stephen H. Rigby, Boston 1086–1225: A Medieval Boom Town. Lincoln: The Society of Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, 2017. xii + 136pp. 34 figures. 6 maps. Bibliography. Glossary. £12.50 pbk.

Himalayan Boom Town: Rural–Urban Transformations in Namchi, Sikkim

ABSTRACTNamchi, in the Indian state of Sikkim, is undergoing a building boom that is transforming a small district headquarters into an urban showpiece. Centred on religious theme parks and urban beautification, the boom captures Sikkim's emphasis on tourism as a development strategy. Growth in hydropower and pharmaceutical industries within the state, and infrastructure enabling this growth, seek to reduce dependency on the Indian government and have turned Sikkim into a ‘backyard’ for Indian capital. In contrast, Namchi epitomizes the transition from rural to urban space through tourism‐led growth, creating a ‘front yard’ exhibit which was recently awarded Smart City status despite its small size and relative unimportance. This article explores Namchi's boom by analysing the politics that drive it, the buildings and landscapes that capture its excess, and the town's lived urban spaces. The authors focus on three aspects of Namchi's boom: first, it is crucial for projections of success in Sikkim and aligns urban transformation with a particular vision of development actively promoted by the Chief Minister and ruling party; second, it is not based on resource extraction or agrarian expansion but on funds transferred to cultivate and reward loyalty in this border region; and third, it is drawing migrant workers to the town in large numbers, causing fissures and tensions, and simultaneously creating an emergent, though uneasy, cosmopolitanism.

Mapping institutional work as a method for local strategy; learning from boom/bust dynamics in the Canadian west

We investigate the potential of mapping institutional work in communities as a method for both analyzing and formulating local development strategy. Twelve Canadian case communities experiencing dramatic ups and downs (‘boom and bust towns’) serve as the empirical base. Analytically, we find that institutional work for strategy takes on very diverse forms, some of them not described in the literature, and further identify a special class of institutional work associated with leadership. Normatively, we demonstrate that mapping institutional work can be a structured process of self-reflection underpinning strategy. For the Canadian case study, we find that lack of local autonomy is often a stumbling block for strategy. More broadly, we conclude that mapping institutional work for strategy works best when governance evolutions are grasped as context, and when strategy itself is understood in its complex, multifaceted nature: a narrative, a way of linking institutions, and an institution in itself.

Urban Modernity versus the Blood Diamond Legacy: Angola’s Urban Mining Settlements in the Aftermath of War

For most of the latter half of the 20th century, war carved the contours of settlement and mining activity in Angola. The aim of this article is twofold: first, to contrast migrant and urban livelihoods during the war, distinguishing between artisanal guerrilla diamond-digging settlements and the refuge ‘government cities’, and, secondly, to compare recent patterns of migration, livelihoods, mineral production and aspirations among urban residents. This article focuses on four urban settlements in the Lundas’ diamond-producing provinces, tracing wartime diamond growth in boom towns and cantonment in government cities. Post-war urban regeneration is characterised by investment in formal planned cities, and constraints on the informal mining boom towns and their garimpo artisanal miners. Questions are posed regarding these settlements’ population movements, livelihoods, residents’ conceptions of urban life and their quest for modernity. Amidst the multiplicity of wartime legacies and the envisaged reconstruction, renewed perceptions of urban life are increasingly focused on non-mining livelihoods.

Listening to silence - trauma and recovery in post-golpe Chile.

I visited Chile for the first time in 2003. Over the course of the 12 months during which the country became my home, I realised there was a secret side to the capital city, Santiago. Never was this clearer than when I witnessed a demonstration to mark the 30th anniversary of the 11 September 1973 coup, when General Pinochet took power. I watched tears stream down the cheeks of men and women as they sang along with the revolutionary Cuban folk singer Silvio Rodriguez, raising their fists in the air. I felt the distrust of and anger towards the police who lined rooftops with snipers and the military units which filled side streets with water cannons. It was a visceral experience, made more so by the contrast with day-to-day life on the city's streets. This was a boom town, proud of its malls and economic growth, and the residents of Santiago made every effort to remark upon their high standards of living.

Who Is the Other?: An Indian Christian Perspective

Who Is the Other? An Indian Christian Perspective M. Thomas Thangaraj (bio) salvific necessity of Christ, historical settings, windows into God, Trinity, eschatology, exclusivity of God, the church One way to address the question of the “other” is to begin with the tradition in its earliest form and then travel through history to see how our vision of the other has either changed or stayed constant. However, I have decided to start from how my ancestors and I defined the other in the Tamil Protestant Christian settings and then travel back to New Testament times. Tamil Protestant Christianity is a vast, comprehensive, and misleading term. It includes the Church of South India (consisting of former Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Congregationalists who came together in 1947 to form a united church), 1 the Methodist Church of India (which has linkages with the United Methodist Church in the U.S.A.), 2 the Lutheran churches (three separate denominations such as Tamil Evangelical Lutheran Church, Arcot Lutheran Church, and the Indian Evangelical Lutheran Church), and other Protestant groups such as Seventh-day Adventists, the Assembly of God, the Pentecostal Church, the Church of Christ, the Reorganized Church of Latter-Day Saints, and others. Here I am directing my attention to the South Tirunelveli area in Tamilnadu, focusing more on the Church of South India congregation in my home town, Nazareth, in India. Nazareth is a small town whose original name was canpattu. During the period preceding 1800, eight persons had converted to Christianity, thanks [End Page 149] to the work of the native evangelists, especially Satyanathan of Tanjore, under the leadership of the missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Church Missionary Society of the Church of England. 3 From 1800 to 1804, the number of converts increased to include the whole population of canpattu, through the work of native evangelists. These early Christians created a village of their own and named it Nazareth. Today, Nazareth is a booming town with several high schools and a liberal arts college, businesses, and factories. As one enters the town, one is impressed by the tall steeple of St. John’s Church, which stands at the center of town. It was built in the same architectural style as the Anglican churches in England during the nineteenth century. The steeple has clocks on all four sides announcing every hour of the day with the chiming of bells. As one enters the main sanctuary, one is impressed by the high altar with crosses and candles, adorned in the appropriate liturgical color, with three stained-glass windows above the altar. Today there are more than 1,500 households living in Nazareth, a great majority of them Christians. The early converts to Christianity lived in the midst of multiple loyalties with regard to their identity formation. Who was the “other” to them in their attempt to define themselves? Before they embraced Christianity, two groups were considered the other—Muslims in that area, and those who belonged to other sub-castes within the caste structure. It is important to note that the other is defined either in communal terms or in sub-communal terms. To put it differently, one’s definition of the other can be in either intercommunal or intracommunal terms. The Muslims were the intercommunal other, and those who belonged to other castes were the intracommunal other. Once they became Christians, this picture of the other was made complex. Two other categories were introduced to the definition of the “other.” Now the Hindus as a whole became the other in intercommunal terms, and the European missionaries became the other in intracommunal terms. So there are now four categories of the other for Nazareth Christians. This leads to their self-definition in these terms: We are Christians and not [End Page 150] Muslims or Hindus. We are Indian Christians and not other-caste Christians or European Christians. It is clear that these Christians went through a tension between their identity as Indians and Tamils on the one hand and their identity as Christians on the other. The way they negotiated between these two loyalties was through a dynamics of difference, of claiming the otherness of...

Chicago’s Greatest Year, 1893: The White City and the Birth of a Modern Metropolis by Joseph Gustaitis

Reviewed by: Chicago’s Greatest Year, 1893: The White City and the Birth of a Modern Metropolis by Joseph Gustaitis Jeff Nichols Joseph Gustaitis, Chicago’s Greatest Year, 1893: The White City and the Birth of a Modern Metropolis. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 346pp. $29.95. No other event in Chicago history has captured the popular and scholarly imagination as much as the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The White City has inspired children’s books, a board game, an indie rock song, a series of romance novels, an upcoming movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and an impressive number of monographs on religion, race, gender, art, technology, and urban history. Joseph Gustaitis, a former humanities editor for Collier’s Encyclopedia and an Emmy-winning television writer, does not feel that our fascination with the Columbian Exposition is misplaced, but he believes that the desire to contrast the perfectly orchestrated spectacle in Jackson Park with its dirty, disorderly host city has caused us to overlook innovations and movements that contributed to the emergence of Chicago as a global city. “Chicago in 1893 was a city of pestilence, pollution and poverty,” admits Gustaitis. But Chicago was also “a city of museums and merchants, skyscrapers and schools, candy and clerics, writers and reformers, entrepreneurs and engineers, bicycles and ballparks” (12). The eclecticism of Chicago’s Greatest Year is both its strength and its weakness. Gustaitis covers cultural institutions (the Art Institute, the Field Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry, the Chicago Public Library), business (Sears, Montgomery Ward, Armour, Wrigley Gum), feminism (Frances Willard and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union), religion (Father Augustus Tolton and Dwight Lyman Moody), education (Illinois Institute of Technology), literature (Henry Blake Fuller, Finley Peter Dunne, and George Ade), sports (the West Side Grounds), food (the Chicago hot dog), the built environment (the Chicago School of Architecture), reform politics (William T. Stead), and public health (Provident Hospital, Florence Kelley, and early movements for clean water and air). Many of these subjects will be easily recognizable to students of Chicago history or the Progressive Era, but the inclusion of heart surgery, Vienna Beef, the Chicago Cubs, bicycle culture, smallpox vaccination, Juicy Fruit gum, and the Society for the Prevention of Smoke into an analysis of the city’s history makes the book an enjoyable but edifying read. Gustaitis skillfully ties his subjects to that which draws people from around the world to Chicago today. Though filled with familiar landmarks and corporations, Chicago’s Greatest Year thankfully ventures beyond the [End Page 143] Loop. Gustaitis gives greater attention to St. Monica, an African American Catholic parish led by Father Augustus Tolton, than he does the Art Institute. The story of Daniel Hale Williams, an African-American doctor who performed one of the world’s first successful open-heart surgical operations in Provident Hospital, really does not fit within the established narratives of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Gustaitis uses the accomplishments of Williams, who was once a barber, and Provident Hospital, an institution he founded to give equal treatment of care to patients regardless of race, to explore how Chicago became one of the premier medical centers in the world. Chicago’s Greatest Year does not insinuate that 1893 was the high-water mark for Chicago literature, nor does Gustaitis suggest Henry Blake Fuller, Finley Peter Dunne, and George Ade were somehow superior to Federal Writers’ Project alumni Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel, and Saul Bellow. Instead, he rehabilitates that frequently forgotten trio of writers to show the transformation of Chicago from a boom town with little (other than the great literary magazine The Dial) to show for it, into a place with its distinctive voice in American literature. Some readers may, however, tire of the methods by which Gustaitis ties a number of his subjects to 1893. For example, the 1893 incorporation of Sears, Roebuck, and Co., its move from Minneapolis to Chicago, and the release of the new company’s first catalog were not managerial master-strokes, but rather decisions that led to an overexpansion in a severe economic downturn. Two years later, Richard W. Sears sold half of his failing company to Aaron Nussbaum, an entrepreneur...