Land Of Sunshine Research Articles

The Nature of Ruins

The nature of ruins is that they consist of entangled narratives, the human story often becoming concealed and at one with the landscape. A ruin is described as something in a state of deterioration caused by lack of maintenance or by a willful act of destruction. This can be extended to our mental well-being. Theories of ruin and entanglement provide models for reflection and unravelling of uncomfortable truths revealed in postcolonial landscapes and related migration stories. Plants offer an element of balance and healing.Textiles played a significant role in African history, with traditions of skillful weaving and dyeing that can be traced back thousands of years. Textiles were also hugely important in Caribbean plantation economy, traded alongside and sometimes for enslaved Africans. The interweaving of warp and weft forms the structure of cloth. Pulling threads symbolizes a controlled manipulation of the cultural fabric of societies, weakening the structure. Reconstructed threads create a hybrid, giving life to something damaged or ruined. Once pulled, do threads retain traces of their original source? Working with textiles and natural dyes allows for a more sustainable and rooted practice, with metaphorical “play” helping in processing the complexities of intertwined history and cultural identity. The unspoken, the dislocation, the hole is often where the healing lies.Our history blows in the wind, and threads unravel with time. Empty patches of knowledge lost, some never to be regained. How do we weave new narrative and connect to the lands where we live? It is interesting, the sense of urgency I felt to connect to a stone pillar of Nubian design seen on a ruined 1835 flax mill in Northern England. The pillar kept me strong, helped me identify with an ancient part of my African heritage in a land where I was classified as “minority ethnic.” Great Britain, land of my birth, land that fought for ownership of Waitukubuli. Her tall green body divided into tiny economic plots, sold, abused, and then abandoned.After many years of mental tug-of-war, I have returned “home” to Dominica, land of sunshine, hurricanes, and volcanic energy. Living here, I feel a greater sense of belonging and connection to my drumbeat pulse. Nature lures me to the rusty sugarcane rollers shrouded by an entanglement of healing herbs. Roots dig deep, cracking solid stone walls of abandoned mills, reducing them back to dust. I dig hands in rich red soil, grow things and extract botanical color for textile works. It is the plants such as the wah-wah and noni that speak, revealing hidden stories of survival and African retention. Wah-wah, an indigenous wild yam (Rajania cordata), a means of survival for the Maroons who escaped the plantations.I feel there is also a sense of loss and pain buried in the core of every living thing that roots itself here, for even the plants have been transplanted. What connects us to the soil as Caribbean people? We plant, pick bush, talk herbal talk. Elders speak of bush baths and rubs for achy joints. What do we use here to heal residual trauma?I think of Stuart Hall, the sadness in his eyes, and know that through his struggle, through his work, he too, like the Nubian pillar, has strengthened me, kept me upright in times of yearning to be home. Can we, I wonder, as Caribbean people, ever embrace ruins from a purely romantic stance?

Jewish Socialists in the Land of Sunshine: Freedom, Springtime and the <em>Pesakh</em> Spirit of the Future

Jewish Socialists in the Land of Sunshine: Freedom, Springtime and the <em>Pesakh</em> Spirit of the Future

Jewish Socialists in the Land of Sunshine: Freedom, Springtime and the Pesakh Spirit of the Future

Nature is free-springtime is here!The folk is free-Passover is here!- Chaim ShapiroBorn in Russia in wake of assassination of Tsar Alexander II, Chaim (Khayim) Shapiro moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1908. Although he was just twenty-two years old at time, he was already a veteran activist and became a founding member of city's first Yiddish-based Jewish organizations, including local branch of Arbeter Ring (Workmen's Circle). He served as principle for city's first Yiddish school, as director of Jewish Consumptive Relief Association's Sanatorium for victims of tuberculosis in Duarte (now known as City of Hope), as president of Los Angeles chapters of Histadrut (Israeli General Federation of Labor) and ORT (Society for Trades and Agricultural Labor), and as chairman Los Angeles offices of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. A graduate of University of Southern California Law School, Shapiro was one of city's leading defenders of civil liberties, representing several of city's unions and dozens of political activists threatened with imprisonment and deportation. An active leader in Socialist Party, he ran for lieutenant governor in 1930, on a socialist ticket with his friend Upton Sinclair, and was party's candidate for mayor of Los Angeles in 1933. He was also a prominent voice in fight against Nazism in Los Angeles, serving as chairman of United Anti-Nazi Conference and Jewish People's Relief Committee. Despite his left-leaning politics, he became a founding member of Los Angeles Bureau of Jewish Education and Los Angeles Jewish Community Council, serving for a time as Vice President. During his six decades in Los Angeles, he played a leading role in nearly every aspect of progressive politics and Jewish community life.In 1913, four-and-a-half years after his arrival, Chaim Shapiro penned an essay entitled Gedanken vegn frayhayt (Thoughts About Freedom), published in inaugural Pesakh (Passover) edition of Los Angeles' first Yiddish newspaper, Kalifornieryidish shtime (California Jewish Voice).1 Written in Yiddish, his essay honored occasion by joyfully recounting story of Jews' liberation in Egypt and linking that liberation to nature's renewal in springtime. Rather than offer praises to God, he heralded Jews' freedom from slavery as a product of collective action and called on his fellow Jews to be more involved in fight against slavery and oppression of their times. Weaving together religious and secular philosophy with allusions to natural world, Shapiro used Pesakh story as a medium for expressing his beliefs about Jewish peoplehood, politics, and prospects for future human liberation. Known for his forceful oratory, Shapiro was a people's propagandist, not a prolific writer or theorist, and Thoughts About Freedom is one of only a few pieces of his published work that remains today. The essay thereby provides a rare glimpse of how he understood his Jewish identity and a vital means of uncovering ideals that animated his long career as an activist.This article will examine Shapiro's life and variety of religious, political, and literary influences he contended with during his years in Europe and America, each providing important intellectual resources through which he forged his ethnic-socialist worldview, as described in his Thoughts About Freedom. Rather than debate truth or legitimacy of his interpretations of Jewish tradition, I will argue that Shapiro's system of beliefs was heterodox and syncretic, an ideological bricolage that blended sacred and secular, socialism and nationalism, and religious and philosophical traditions from Europe and America into his own particular understanding of Pesakh holiday and what it meant to be Jewish. First, I will consider Shapiro's life in Europe to examine his claim that socialism was the Pesakh spirit of future, showing how he combined his religious education and his engagement with socialism to forge his own understanding of Jewish peoplehood. …

“New England Innocent” in the Land of Sunshine: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and California

“New England Innocent” in the Land of Sunshine: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and California

“That Magnificent Land of Sunshine, Health, and Wealth”: How U.S. Entrepreneurs Sold Cuba's Isle of Pines

At the start of the twentieth century, U.S. citizens began settling and investing on the Isle of Pines off the coast of Cuba. U.S. entrepreneurs who believed the Isle was or would become U.S. territory bought vast tracts from Spanish and Cuban landowners. They then subdivided the land and marketed it to farmers and middle-class Americans still in search of opportunity on a disappearing frontier. These landholding companies' promotions helped shape the assumptions and expectations of thousands of Americans who settled on the Isle over the next few decades. Companies portrayed the Isle as a tropical paradise safe for white settlement and ripe for development. They promised high returns-on-investment for those looking to engage in citrus production for export, as well as a healthful climate for those plagued by chronic illness. Some of these settlers publicly echoed landholding companies' portrayal and remained on the Isle for years. Others found the Isle's promise to be grossly exaggerated and returned to the United States feeling swindled by unscrupulous entrepreneurs. Although set in a foreign land, U.S. interest in the Isle reveals much about life in the United States, including the changing nature of expansion, the growing power of advertising, and middle-class discontent.

The Land of Sunshine

The Florida I grew up with - Marineland, Coral Castle, Weeki Wachee, mom-and-pop motels - is fast disappearing, replaced with more and more theme parks and big box chain hotels. Before the interstates laced across the state, US1 was the main access to Florida and many of these older attractions (or what remains of them) lie along this highway. The Land of Sunshine is my photographic series that sets out to document these disappearing monuments before all trace of them is gone.
 So much of living in a place designed for the sole purpose of selling itself to visitors is the sacrifice of nostalgia. These cute mom-and-pops motels and the boardwalk, which hold fond memories for many in the region, just look run down and “old” to the tourists. For this reason, little stays the way it is; there is constant remodeling, a never-ending expansion, and a steady development. This happens to the point that much of Florida’s history is lost, forgotten, and covered up by the sky-rise, beach-view condos that seem to multiply daily.
 Florida’s commodity is itself. It’s an image. It’s a reflection of both careful branding as well as exterior expectations. This process creates a special sort of irony. In an area where tourism is a major part of the economy, this region chooses to let itself be shaped so that visitors will be pleased. A business could only succeed based on the public opinions of places such as Peoria, IL or Toledo, OH. Now the region mourns the loss of landmarks built primarily for others.
 Starting at the Florida-Georgia border, I have been traveling along US1 documenting the remnants of attractions, motels, roadside stands, “tourist traps” and whatever else I find along the highway. There is a reoccurring theme along this highway and throughout Florida (and probably much of America right now) - property. Past commercial successes no longer possible and unbridled ambition have motivated small groups to purchase, parcel and zone all possible land. The result is an area razed by “outsiders” in the name of progress. To those in the region, the word “developer” has become something most foul. They are seen as destroyers of mass pleasure for the sake of private profit. They are seen as vampires.
 In my series I photographed an empty lot that once was the Daytona Bowl. My memories of the Daytona Bowl include skipping class one afternoon to go there with a friend in high school. I had never been bowling before and although it seemed like an odd way to spend a skip day (usually young people enjoy more “dangerous” or exciting activities) but there, with the unemployed and the retired, I bowled for the first time and found out I was fairly decent at the sport.
 The Daytona Bowl lot was purchased in 2004 and torn down in preparation for a condominium that was never built. Now the empty lot is up for sale. There are a lot of things in Daytona that were torn down in the real estate boom that were never replaced. I can’t help but think as I drive by them that if only they hadn’t been torn down in the first place we could still be bowling or playing skee ball at the boardwalk.
 How long can we as a society continue to expand? Is new always better? Is old always bad? Perhaps this region should be allowed to embrace what the tourists have abandoned.
 Liz Murphy Thomas is an artist, photographer and educator. She holds a BFA in Creative Photography from the University of Florida and an MFA in Photography and Digital Imaging from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Ms. Thomas’ work investigates issues of identity, memory and the associations we give to our possessions. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the University of Illinois Springfield.

Suffering in the Land of Sunshine: A Los Angeles Illness Narrative (review)

Reviewed by: Suffering in the Land of Sunshine: A Los Angeles Illness Narrative Gretchen Krueger Emily K. Abel. Suffering in the Land of Sunshine: A Los Angeles Illness Narrative. Critical Issues in Health and Medicine. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006. xviii + 176 pp. Ill. $68.00 (cloth, 978-0-8135-3900-3), $24.95 (978-0-8135-3901-0). In the early 1900s, my husband’s great-grandfather moved his entire family across the country from Milwaukee to Los Angeles. He, like many others, sought a tuberculosis cure in the “land of sunshine.” Undoubtedly, his declining health, his deep concern for his family’s survival, and the promise of a better climate must have driven this Russian immigrant to journey west so soon after settling in America. But why did he choose this particular southern California city? In her book, Emily K. Abel illustrates how medical, social, and political factors combined to make this growing city both a haven for health seekers and a place whose leaders and residents had mixed feelings about welcoming all who sought comfort there. At the center of her story is Charles Dwight Willard—a transplant from Chicago, a journalist, a novelist, a city booster, and a near invalid whose experiences Abel uses to personalize her account. As Abel explains in the introduction, focusing the narrative on Willard was serendipitous. Amid her research for a related book, she found Willard’s rich cache of papers and correspondence at the Huntington Library. His frequent letters home to his parents and siblings, his dark stories and biting editorials, and his interactions with noted figures in local, state, and national politics made him a good candidate for a historical study. Moreover, his opinionated prose made him the perfect protagonist. Abel quotes from his writings frequently to outline his personal and professional life in California. We gain a detailed understanding of Willard’s struggle not only to support himself and, eventually, his small family, [End Page 423] but also to achieve a position of status in the bust and boom cycles of this early city. Each achievement, however, is dulled by the threat of a hemorrhage or other health setback. Abel captures Willard’s daily physical and emotional challenges, paying particular attention to the female caregivers—family members, hired servants, and boarders—who alleviated his suffering. As in her previous work, Hearts of Wisdom, she examines the obligations and rewards of lay nursing. Readers will quickly appreciate that Willard is a complex figure worth further investigation. At the outset of his career, he wrote of the health benefits of southern California. Using agricultural metaphors, he promoted the moderate climate as a place in which all things would thrive. However, as his own physical condition deteriorated, he was increasingly outspoken in his condemnation of policies designed to accommodate or welcome those with consumption to the area. Taking great pains to hide his own progressively declining health, he publicly condemned specific at-risk populations and condemned plans to improve or increase facilities for the ill. The pace of the narrative slows at times, as we learn of the day-to-day trials of Willard’s illness. It shines brightest, however, when Abel combines this careful accounting with her artful contextualization of Willard’s life amid the changing late-nineteenth-century California landscape, contemporary medical theories of consumption, and local political debates playing out in the newspapers and institutions Willard fought to join. The secondary literature to which Abel points is not exhaustive, but it provides a starting point for readers interested in the history of health and disease. Suffering in the Land of Sunshine is a rich case study that should be read alongside Abel’s recent book, Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion,1 for a complete understanding of how chronic illness deeply affects the individual, family, community, and nation. Particularly through the voluminous writings of Charles Willard, Abel presents questions that help us reconsider the past and may help us rethink our current public health policies and, if not more important, our attitudes toward the sick. [End Page 424] Gretchen Krueger Wells Fargo Bank, San Francisco Footnotes 1. Emily K. Abel, Tuberculosis and the Politics of...

Domesticating the Aliens Within: Sentimental Benevolence in Late-Nineteenth-Century California Magazines

This essay analyzes the workings of romantic love and its legal institution, marriage, as signs of universal humanity in fictional representation of Chinese immigrant women in two important California magazines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Overland Monthly and the Land of Sunshine , including short stories written by Asian American/Eurasian writer Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton. Reading these fictional narratives in the contexts of the period's prevailing trope of "yellow slavery," antimiscegenation legislation that codified white heteronormativity, and the magazines' expansionist rhetoric, I argue that these narratives constitute a "culture of benevolence"-sentimental emancipatory discourse shaped by U.S. women's reform movements-which has been integral to the racial projects of the U.S. nation and empire. By tracing the tension between the trope of "yellow slavery" and marriage, I situate my analysis within the broader shared ideological structure and connected histories that racialized African Americans and Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century all the while foregrounding how heteronormative narratives about Chinese immigrant labor produced the period's shifting boundaries between the domestic and the foreign. I argue that while sentimental narratives attempt to address injustices by "humanizing" the Chinese, that is, by imagining their inclusion in universal humanity through heteronormative love and marriage, the very terms of heteronormativity paradoxically rationalize the logic of exclusionary laws, obscure imperial historic power relations, and undermine the eligibility of the Chinese for citizenship, socially, culturally, and politically. These narratives thus expose the limits of emancipatory discourses that posit heteronormative love and marriage as the passages to full membership within U.S. capitalist and imperial relations.

:Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion: A History of Public Health and Migration to Los Angeles.(Critical Issues in Health and Medicine.);Suffering in the Land of Sunshine: A Los Angeles Illness Narrative.(Critical Issues in Health and Medicine.)

When my mother recently entered a nursing home to convalesce from a bad fall, she complained about many things, but perhaps nothing outraged her more than the mandatory tuberculosis (TB) test that was required of her. Having grown up “white” in California's Central Valley during the 1930s and 1940s, she understood tuberculosis testing not as common-sense and socially neutral public health measure but as something reserved for Mexicans and other outsiders. To be tested for TB was, in her mind, one more indication of her current powerlessness and threatened social status. She was right. It is this stigma of TB—its association with racialized and working-class bodies—and the policies that flowed from it that Emily K. Abel recounts in Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion. Focusing specifically on the city of Los Angeles, Abel shows us how the cultivation of a regional mythology of health in the late nineteenth and...

Suffering in the Land of Sunshine: A Los Angeles Illness Narrative

Suffering in the Land of Sunshine: A Los Angeles Illness Narrative

William Deverell and Greg Hise (eds): Land of sunshine, an environmental history of metropolitan Los Angeles

William Deverell and Greg Hise (eds): Land of sunshine, an environmental history of metropolitan Los Angeles

Review of Deverell and Hise, Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles.

Review Article| February 01 2007 Review of Deverell and Hise, Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles. MATTHEW KLINGLE MATTHEW KLINGLE Bowdoin College Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (2007) 76 (1): 137–138. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2007.76.1.137 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation MATTHEW KLINGLE; Review of Deverell and Hise, Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles.. Pacific Historical Review 1 February 2007; 76 (1): 137–138. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2007.76.1.137 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search This content is only available via PDF. 2007 by The Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Fit to be citizens?: public health and race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Interlopers in the Land of Sunshine: Chinese Disease Carriers, Launderers, and Vegetable Peddlers 2. Caught between Discourses of Disease, and Nation: Public Health Attitudes toward Japanese and Mexican Laborers in Progressive-Era Los Angeles 3. Institutionalizing Public Health in Ethnic Los Angeles in the 1920s 4. We Can No Longer Ignore the Problem of the Mexican: Depression-Era Public Health Policies in Los Angeles 5. The Fight for Health, Morality, and Decent Living Standards: Mexican Americans and the Struggle for Public Housing in 1930s Los Angeles Epilogue: Genealogies of Racial Discourses and Practices Notes Bibliography Index

Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915 (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895–1915 Ann L. Ardis Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895–1915. Martha H. Patterson . Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Pp. xii + 230. $35.00 (cloth). Cultural historians and literary critics have used the term "New Woman" exclusively to describe white, well-educated, politically progressive activists and realistic women writers at the turn of the twentieth century. In her richly archival study, Martha Patterson emphasizes instead "the important regional, ethnic, and political differences of the American New Woman" as an icon of modernity (16), as figured in the work of seven American women writers: Margaret Murray Washington, Pauline Hopkins, Edith Wharton, Sui Sin Far, Mary Johnston, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather. A chapter on Charles Dana Gibson's popular illustrations establishes "the rhetorical and visual context" within which Patterson interprets these writers' "literary production" (22). Taking important cues from Dale Bauer's work on cultural dialogics and Judith Butler's on the performativity of gender, Patterson explores how these turn-of-the-century writers reconfigure the dominant trope of the New Woman by reading "that discourse in relationship to the other circulating 'new' tropes" (22)—that of the "New Negro," the "New Negro Woman," the "New China," the "New South"—which they alternately "co-opted, rejected, transformed, and/or reiterated" (26). Demonstrating how "a seemingly celebratory term like the New Woman" can emblematize not only "progressive reform, consumer power, and transgressive femininity" but also "racial and ethnic taxonomies, social Darwinism, and imperialist ambitions" (26), Patterson productively complicates the American New Woman's literary and cultural history, reinforcing the "important shift in New Woman criticism" first registered in the efforts of scholars such as Kathy Peiss, Susan Glenn, and Marjorie Wheeler to give the term "New Woman" "essential class, ethnic, and regional specificity" (18). While Patterson does not herself stress this point, her study lends support to the argument Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham have recently made about both "the importance of the periodical press in the New Woman phenomenon" and the instrumental role that New Woman writers and the New Woman debates played "in developing the periodical press in all its diversity and polyvocality" at the turn of the twentieth century.1 As noted above, Patterson describes her project's focus as being on the "literary production" of these writers, and this study does indeed include extensive close readings of novels and short fiction. Yet one of the most interesting aspects of this book is its treatment of these writers' contributions to a fascinatingly diverse array of national, regional, and local periodicals and both highbrow and middlebrow mass circulation magazines as they engaged in contemporary debates regarding the various sociopolitical trends that "signaled hope for and anxiety about political and economic change in a new century" (22). If, for example, Sui Sin Far's "attitude toward the Chinese New Woman" is "necessarily … vexed because each word in the phrase is at the center of a contested sociopolitical debate" (24), it is also vexed because she is negotiating a complexly fragmented public sphere, writing for regional journals such as Walter Blackburn Harte's Lotus (Kansas City) and The Land of Sunshine: An Illustrated Monthly of Southern California, as well as for progressive, nationally syndicated periodicals such as The Independent. In the case of a writer like Willa Cather, the articles and literary reviews that reveal so much about her ambivalent fascination with the power and danger of a figure associated at once with "modernity, 'degeneracy,' professionalism, education, 'downright grit,' and gender transgression" (154) were collected and edited in the 1970s—and thus have been readily available to students and scholars for some time. By contrast, although Hopkins' "magazine novels" have recently been collected and edited, her writings for the Colored [End Page 168] American Magazine have not. This study's wealth of references to uncollected periodical press writings speaks volumes about the complex staging of "a public sphere that is not one."2 In this regard, though revisionary public sphere theory remains just beyond Patterson's explicit horizon of interests in this study, her research complements the arguments that scholars such as Todd...

Sunshine and Smoke: The Environmental History of Los Angeles

Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles is fascinating anthology on relationship between City of Angels and its often-turbulent environment. The nineteen essayists, which include scholars from number of disciplines, set out to explore, in words of editors William Deverell and Greg Hise, a large set of regional environmental factors, environmental perspectives, and environmental challenges (p. 1). Deverell and Hise have high expectations for collection, hoping that Land of Sunshine will contribute to contemporary discussions on sustainability of greater Los Angeles region in particular, and urban-industrial society in general. With this goal, editors, in solid introduction, press often-repeated but seldom recognized idea that history, indeed, matters. Contributing scholars have difficult task of investigating relationship between successive social, economic, and cultural regimes and southern California ecosystem. In this regard, metropolitan of Los Angeles comprises primary theme of book. Borrowing from concepts of effects of city building on neighboring regions advanced by William Cronon, Donald Worster, and host of other scholars, Land of Sunshine's authors examine people transform nature in particular sites and ... how what is created in particular locales is generative for local and broader culture (p. 4). Planning is unifying feature of Los Angeles's environmental history, and as result, city begins the twenty-first century struggling with consequences of success, in its urban arrangements, both hoped for an unintended (p. 10). As Deverell and Hise point out, functional segregation ... which we now decry, was seen by sanitarians, social workers, progressives, and advocates for urban redevelopment as cure-all for urban ills (p. 6). Other reformers saw automobile, now bane of many Southland residents, as critical tool for blurring divisions between urban and rural. Well-meaning proponents of exclusionary zoning and early forms of NIMBY-ism (The

Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles

Most people equate Los Angeles with smog, forty suburbs in search of a city - the great what not to do of twentieth-century city building. But there's much more to LA's story than this shallow stereotype. History shows that Los Angeles was intensely, ubiquitously planned. The consequences of that planning - the environmental history of urbanism - is one place to turn for the more complex lessons LA has to offer. Working forward from ancient times and ancient ecologies to the very recent past, Land of Sunshine is a fascinating exploration of the environmental history of greater Los Angeles. The essays, by nineteen leading geologists, ecologists, and historians consider the changing dynamics both of the city and of nature. In the nineteenth century, for example, density was considered an evil, and reformers struggled mightily to move the working poor out to areas where better sanitation and flowers and parks made life seem worth the living. We now call that vision sprawl, and we struggle just as much to bring middle-class people back into the core of American cities. There's nothing natural, or inevitable, about such turns of events. It's only by paying very close attention to the ways metropolitan nature has been constructed and construed that meaningful lessons can be drawn. The result is a rich portrait of Los Angeles that will serve planners, communities, and environmentalists as they look to the past for clues, if not blueprints, for enhancing the quality and viability of cities.

Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida

Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida

Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida (review)

Reviewed by: Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida Ken Whalen Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida Gary R. Mormino . University of Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 2005. 457 pp., photographs, maps. $34.95 hardcover (ISBN 0-8130-2818-3) In Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams, Gary Mormino, Duckwall Professor of History at the University of South Florida, charts the historic and spatial relationships between the forces of human culture—including imaginative geographies—and the unique environment of the state of Florida. His temporal boundaries mainly encompass the twentieth century, though forays into earlier times are found only when they add sequential depth to his modern map. Mormino's book, which took eight years to write, is now the center of an invaluable set of monographs produced for the Florida History and Culture Series initiated in 1997 through the University of Florida Press. The series includes critically acclaimed non-fiction books, each one focusing on a particular topic ranging from the Civil Rights Movement, Native Americans, Feminism to Florida Crackers. Land of Sunshine is a social history, vibrant with facts but never bedazzling. Mormino is perfectly charitable with twists of perspectives such as in the use of statistical analogies and similes that do not divert us from the intellectual destination of his book. His navigational technique makes for smooth sailing through the oceans of texts he has diligently sniggled from below the surface and combined into a thorough account of people and landscapes of modern Florida. The nine substantive chapters present a collage of themes that have been distilled from a deep knowledge of Florida history and geography, and refined into appealing phases that speak to those most prominent economic, political, social, technological and natural forces that have most changed Florida and its inhabitants. Each chapter contains a number of tables and maps that simply show the locations of places mentioned. The first chapter, "Look Away Dixie-land," proposes that new technology such as air conditioning, New Deal entitlements including Social Security, and the availability of relatively cheap land touched-off Florida's demographic 'Big Bang' of the 1950s. During the next five decades the state's population increased from around 2 million to 16 million people. Migrants came from all over the Western Hemisphere (but mostly from the Northeast and Midwest United States) to reshape Florida's cultural landscape into a mosaic of multicultural features that blend with con-urbanization, edge and walled cities, and shopping malls to create a new "urban megastate." Many parts of Florida now seem eons away from the cultural traditions and landscapes of vernacular "Dixie" to which it once aptly belonged. Chapter 2, "Florida on the Installment Plan," focuses specifically on the marketing of land during Florida's ". . . third great land boom" which galvanized its population explosion. The availability of low interest credit increased the number of potential buyers of land and homes in the state. But before installment plans could be [End Page 325] drawn, imaginative geographies of Florida, particularly those of northern retirees, would need to be refashioned, from dismal swamp to land of leisurely fun under the sun. Businessmen, inventors, bankers and celebrities who acquired large tracks of land for development created and promoted this new identity. Several short biographies of landscape coalesce into a brief who's who of Florida's residential development, both successes and failures. Similar biographies in the next chapter help tell the story of the rise of modern Florida tourism. Moreover, the section radiates with accounts of old and new venues of entertainment and leisure and their ethnic, historic and regional significance. The Florida vacation soon became a defining signature of American life just like owning a house and car. Along with federal, state and local government policies, and new technology and transportation infrastructure, came the transformation of leisure into consumption in post-industrial capitalism. This "signature" carved into social and natural landscape of Florida has had both positive and negative impacts. Sadly, Florida's ecosystems have suffered mostly the latter. "Vacation," writes Mormino (p. 119), "is the antithesis of conservation." The "gray wave" is the focus of chapter 4. Mormino explains in detail...

Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida

Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida

Land of Sunshine, Land of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida (review)

Reviewed by: Land of Sunshine, Land of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida Stephen J. Whitfield (bio) Land of Sunshine, Land of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida By Gary R. MorminoUniversity Press of Florida, 2005457 pp. Cloth, $34.95 A glum paradox is embedded in the recent history of Florida. "I spent thirty years of my life trying to get people to move down there," the former mayor of Orlando has recalled. "And then they all did." In dreams begin responsibilities, which can lead to repercussions. The glad hand that for a century Florida residents have extended to tourists and to land developers, to senescent retirees and to spring-break hedonists has been so accepted that the consequences have been appalling: environmental degradation, traffic congestion, and the sort of sprawl that implies a kind of devotion to ugliness. The much touted attractions of the state—its sublime and tranquil beauty, its glistening beaches, its wish-you-were-here weather—became all too obvious; and a stunning growth in population has facilitated not only spectacular prosperity but also resulted in the staggering problems associated with uncontrolled growth. When Carl T. Langford, the Orlando mayor who played the role of booster a little too persuasively, decided to retire, he moved to North Carolina. To the whole cluster of crises that Mach-2 modernization produces, Florida can be considered a first responder. At the dawn of the twentieth century, perhaps no southern state was sleepier; indeed until the end of the 1960s, even the Tallahassee legislature met only every other year—for sixty days. Before World War II, when Gary R. Mormino's account begins, no state seemed less relevant to the challenges that urbanization and industrialization were posing elsewhere. In 1940 no southern state had fewer residents. Before the end of the century, Florida had become the nation's fourth most populous state, and is coming on so fast on the outside that soon even New York will be outpaced. Only one Florida county was needed to decide the 2000 election, with consequences for the planet that have yet to be calibrated. Florida's latitudes do not correspond, however, with its [End Page 104] attitudes; a smaller slice of its residents think of themselves as southern than any state that seceded from the union. Florida even became the first ex-Confederate state to harbor a majority of whites who were born outside the region. Indeed the combustible, dynamic heterogeneity of Florida casts doubt on the meaning of regionalism—the organizing principle that has bewitched many an American historian and social scientist. Texas can at least be attached to the West. But if Florida does not belong to a region that includes, say, Alabama or Arkansas, where can this behemoth be inserted? And if Florida must therefore be subsumed into the South that was long preceded by the adjective "solid," how are essential features of Dixie's identity altered—and even rendered suspect? The jacket photo poses Mormino at a beach—a background that would have been incongruous in showcasing the books of W. J. Cash or C. Vann Woodward. To trace the astonishing transformations of Florida since World War II requires an historian of uncommon skill; but Mormino, who is (inevitably) not a native, is up to the task. Based at the University of South Florida at St. Petersburg, he brings a breathless enthusiasm to his subject, which is illumined through vivid prose and impressively diligent research. Over four dozen of the state's local newspapers have been culled, in addition to more predictable national sources. The standard scholarly journal, the Florida Historical Quarterly, apparently failed to keep up with the tempo of change in the last half century and is barely cited, however. Mormino is serious about the scope of his subtitle: this is social history from which politics has been firmly excluded (although even he cannot ignore the vehement anti-Communism of south Florida's Cubans in affecting American foreign policy in the Caribbean). The text of Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams is sprinkled with a huge array of interesting data, adroitly deployed to back up the claims of demographic and economic cataclysm. But this book...