Local Boosters Research Articles

Regional Rivals, Pacific Partners

This article examines how urban rivalries in Japan’s capital region shaped public debates in 1930s Yokohama over its place in the Pacific and the wider world. Faced with a collapsing international system, Yokohama’s city leaders contended with neighboring co-nationals Tokyo and Kawasaki as both threats to and potential partners in their city’s future as an industrial and commercial hub at the vanguard of a coming “Age of the Pacific.” While invocations of “the nation” and Japan’s emergent role in the Pacific often colored these debates, local boosters advocated less for the “national weal” and more for what they saw as Yokohama’s “rightful” role at the forefront of Japan’s international trade and transport.

The Politics of Entrepreneurial Embedded ‘VIP Urbanism’ in Bengaluru: Elite Practices and Agency Problem

The cities in India have emerged as highly contested space of ‘geographical and institutional’ reconfiguration and reproducing urban neoliberal policy experiments such as place-marketing, public–private partnership, and local boosterism projects producing new forms of ‘urban entrepreneurialism’ (Smitha, 2017a; Sudhira, 2017). In fact, a variety of neoliberal reforms were introduced in the national context are translated into entrepreneurial planning and policy-induced evictions, displacement and resettlement articulated through various redevelopment projects such as metro rail projects, flyovers and roads in the local context. The urban policies are embedded in the dynamic confluence of economic elites and interest at one hand and reconfiguring local politics on the other. Under these circumstances, realigned institutional practices and regulatory regimes with diverse actors, alliances and organisations are forged with competing hegemonic visions and developmental models (Harvey, 1989; Jessop, 2002; Brenner and Theodore, 2022a). The city government in Bengaluru is increasingly networking with urban elites such as corporate echelons, real estate and land developers, non-governmental organisations and private investors to develop public spaces of daily interactions and practices which are carefully planned to bolster urban image. Such elite coalitions of corporate, public–private and local government have been wielding their collective power and lobbied for changes in various mega- local developmental projects. These elite practices eventually have led to overriding, manipulating and destabilising municipal government and planning instruments. As a result, new forms of polarisation intensifying inequalities at different spatial scales continue to proliferate in the city. Illustrating the case of Bengaluru, the study demonstrates how these non-political entities influence the municipal governance. Clearly, a transition towards ‘entrepreneurial urbanism’ signifying a scenario of ‘less government’ and ‘more corporate’ advocating that cities must be ‘run in a more business-like manner’. The study draws an attention to the spatial dimension of the role of ‘agency’ while critically assessing urban governance.

Lone Star Suburbs: Life on the Texas Metropolitan Frontier

Pushing back against the “Texas Myth,” memory, and history that focus on the frontier, cowboys, and rural life, contributors to Lone Star Suburbs present the reality that most of the state's residents lived in suburbs by the turn of the twenty-first century. According to the 2010 Census, 85 percent of Texans lived in cities and 90 percent in metropolitan areas. Because Texas cities had liberal annexation powers, they expanded to include the boom of mid and late twentieth-century suburban growth.The most interesting essays in the collection consider how Texans’ “rural values” are intertwined with suburban culture and politics. Other contributions do the necessary work of documenting the history of suburbanization in Texas and add to recent scholarship on the suburban experience of African Americans and immigrants. Paul J. P. Sandul provides a historiographic overview and discusses how the Texan embrace of “rugged individualism” and use of “the rural image as a way to mark themselves as different and as better than people from other states”—as “real Americans”—leaves them “hesitant to identify the suburban in their state” and instead “minimizing the suburban side of their history” (11, 13).The planning and boosterism that accompanied the expansion of Texas's metropolitan areas are addressed in several chapters. Tom McKinney tells the story of the Texas Highway Department's engineer-managers who oversaw the urban highway planning that facilitated and encouraged suburban growth. Looking at midcentury planning in Arlington, Irving, Garland, and Grand Prairie, Robert B. Fairbanks demonstrates that suburban growth was not accidental. In fact, well-planned “suburban cities” were envisioned and encouraged by local boosters. For example, Philip G. Pope explains how Irving's chamber of commerce leveraged the identity the city gained as home to the Dallas Cowboys’ Texas Stadium, thus transforming it from a bedroom community into an important center within the greater metropolis. Andrew Baker provides a through discussion of how new suburban areas were governed—expansion of county powers, special tax districts, annexation, or incorporation—and their relative merits.Holding rural identities and valuing rural spaces influenced politics and policy at the metropolitan fringe. Baker's case study of the local debate around disincorporation in Chateau Woods includes an official who self-identified as a “country boy,” reluctantly entering politics to address government abuses. Andrew Busch writes about the grassroots origins of environmental protection in Austin, which included limiting the loss of rural spaces to suburban sprawl. He also notes its problematic aspects: when environmentalists managed to overcome their paradoxical opposition to both sprawl and increased density, additional development was directed toward minority and low-income spaces, leading to displacement.The racial and ethnic diversity of Texas's late twentieth-century suburbs is addressed by several essays. Two chapters use oral histories to document the motivations for African Americans’ moves to Texas suburbs: Theodore M. Lawe and Gwendolyn M. Lawe look at Dallas and Herbert G. Ruffin II studies San Antonio. As they note, more work is needed to understand the relationship between the African American suburban middle-class and economically distressed Black working-class urban neighborhoods. Son Mai adds to the growing literature on “ethnoburbs” with his excellent work on Houston's “Little Saigon,” which demonstrates how these suburban ethnic communities differed from older, urban Chinatowns.The most novel essay of the collection is Jake McAdams's history of the cowboy church movement, informed by oral histories gathered from church members. With its roots in come-as-you-are rodeo worship, cowboy church leaders and congregants embraced rurality, its trappings, and its attributed values—even though most of them lived and worked in the suburbs. He suggests that the cowboy church “appropriates tropes and ideals that have been at the heart of suburban rhetoric and growth” (162) and, like the suburbs, is “rural performance with the comforts of more ‘civilized’ areas” (161). McAdams argues that Cowboy Christians “blame city dwellers and other suburbanites for destroying the nation's morality and their beloved rural landscape,” yet they themselves—and almost all Texans—are also living in the suburbs (161).This anthology successfully achieves the goal its editors set for the volume—it is a “conversation starter” that should lead to additional research (ix). The population of Texas's late twentieth century was suburban; this recognition and accompanying paradox, that so many residents continue to embrace a “rural culture” and the “Texas Myth,” ought to inform a wide breadth of future historical scholarship.

Motel Builders of the Modern West

Motel Builders of the Modern West

Disaster Resilience Versus Ecological Resilience and the Proposed Second Causeway to South Padre Island

The barrier island of South Padre is located off the coast of Texas’s southern tip in Cameron County and is a popular tourist destination with over 4 million annual visits. The only road access to and from the island is a four-lane causeway, 2.3 miles in length, that routinely experiences heavy traffic. Twenty years ago, a barge crashed into the Queen Isabella Causeway, destroying a portion of the bridge. It quickly became apparent how reliant South Padre Island (SPI) is on the causeway and raised questions regarding its lack of disaster resilience. Local boosters and government responded by proposing and planning for the construction of a second causeway that would provide an additional emergency response route and facilitate economic development. However, the planned location for the new bridge crosses through sensitive seagrass beds that this construction would permanently fragment. The habitats for numerous threatened and endangered species would be destroyed, thereby reducing the ecological resilience of the area. Social–ecological theory focuses on the interconnectedness between humans and ecosystems and their symbiotic nature. Yet in the case of SPI, these two dimensions of social–ecological resiliency are in competition with one another. The proposed causeway would ostensibly enhance disaster preparedness and foster economic development but at the expense of the degradation of crucial ecological habitats. This case study provides insight into the contradictions between ecological resilience and disaster resilience from the standpoint of various stakeholders.

Dance with Glauthoritarian Urbanization: An Entrepreneurial Megacity in the Making through the Lenses of Civic Organizations

How do formal civic organizations shape—and how are they shaped by—the making and transformation of urban space? Place-oriented civil society research emphasizes the central role of civic organizations in producing and changing unequal political and economic orders of cities but largely ignores the intercity connections and competitions that contribute to these local civic dynamics in a global capitalist system. Critical urban studies, in contrast, recognizes the influences of global capitalism and local city boosterism on city development but overlooks the paradoxical roles of formal civic organizations. Bringing the two scholarly camps in dialogue, this article explores how formal civic organizations are situated in entrepreneurial city-making in the Global South, when city governments promote their competitive advantage by boosting “social innovation” through nonprofits. Drawing on survey, interview, and social media data from a random sample of nonprofits in Shenzhen, China, our preliminary results highlight that the Shenzhen municipal government’s agenda to promote both global capitalism and authoritarian rules have shaped the urban spaces where nonprofits form and operate. In turn, nonprofits mediate the negotiations between the local state, market, and urban residents to create, transform, and reinvent unequal physical, social, and digital urban space in this Silicon Valley of China.

Red Clay, White Water, and Blues by Virginia E. Causey

Reviewed by: Red Clay, White Water, and Blues by Virginia E. Causey Tyler McCreary Red Clay, White Water, and Blues. Virginia E. Causey. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020. xi and 256 pp., figs., notes, bibliog., and index. $24.95 paperback (ISBN: 9780820358826). Virginia E. Causey's new book, Red Clay, White Water, and Blues, provides the first comprehensive account of the history of Columbus, Georgia. Causey's attention to the dynamics of development in Georgia's third-largest city brings attention to an ordinary city of the American South. Such ordinary and undistinguished cities have largely been neglected by urban studies scholars. Classic works of urban theory and urban history have focused on the declarative great American cities, such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles (Jacobs 1961, Cronon 1991, Soja 1996, Gandy 2002). To the extent that urbanists have studied cities of the American South, they have focused on major centers like Atlanta (Bayor 1996, Lands 2011, Kruse 2013, Hobson 2017). However, few cities in the Southeastern US resemble metro Atlanta and there is a need for more systematic study of the mid-sized cities that predominate in the region. While regional studies of the US South are well established within the historical geography and cultural geography literature, it remains necessary to develop forms of urban theory and urban history attentive to the region. Reading Red Clay, White Water, and Blues provides a lens through which to begin to consider the distinct form of the ordinary city of the South. Tracing from the creation of the city in 1828 to the present, Red Clay, White Water, and Blues combines elements of environmental, political, economic, and cultural history of the city. Located along the Fall Line on the Chattahoochee River, Columbus is a community shaped by its relationships to geography. Causey shows how the development of transportation and energy infrastructures, particularly associated with the river, guided the development of local industry, particularly the historic prominence of textile mills along the Chattahoochee. She also highlights how Columbus is embedded within historic and ongoing tensions tied to plantation legacies that characterize much of the South, even as broader regional, national, and global transformations work on and modify these fault lines. Documenting the historic transformation of this secondary city, Causey charts the enduring mix of boosterism, parochialism, and corruption of the local elite that has shaped urban development. She also stresses the "bloody trail" of [End Page 163] racial violence that remains endemic to the city, reproducing structures of inequalities through broad urban transformations. From its very foundation, Columbus is a community forged through racial violence. As Causey documents, the original source of commercial prosperity driving development was the dispossession of Indigenous lands. Located on Georgia's western boundary, planters and land speculators first flocked to Columbus following the first survey of the community in 1828. The Creek already occupied the area, with the town of Cowetta located only a few miles downriver. Investing in dispossession, plantation and financial elites exploited land theft and the forced removal of the Creeks as the original form of accumulation that structured enduring forms of racialized uneven development. Subsequently, Columbus functioned as a key node in the plantation economy, as textile manufacturing concentrated in the city, which had access to global markets through shipping down the river to the Port of Apalachicola. "In 1860," as Causey documents, "40 percent of white families owned slaves," who "built everything in Columbus—private residences, commercial structures and factories, railroads, and dams" and worked "in industry as skilled workers who competed with free white artisans" (27). Columbus stagnated in the wake of the Civil War. While local boosters sought to embrace new infrastructure developments during Reconstruction, most of the railway proposals aiming to link the city to emerging networks of trade failed, and Macon was "the only significant city to which Columbus had a direct connection" (58). With river transportation through Apalachicola at a competitive disadvantage, economic investment in the city stagnated as "poor rail connections made outside capitalists reluctant to invest" (59). Local elites did not seek to diversify the economy, believing that lack of opportunities engendered a pliant workforce that could be controlled "via a combination of paternalistic...

Bound to the Land: Cove Fort in Kesler Family History and Memory

Bound to the Land: Cove Fort in Kesler Family History and Memory

The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire by Katherine D. Moran

Reviewed by: The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire by Katherine D. Moran Anne M. Martinez The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire. By Katherine D. Moran. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. 330 pp. $48.95. Katherine Moran's The Imperial Church joins a growing body of literature that challenges the late nineteenth and turn of the twentieth century narrative of uniform suppression of Catholicism in the United States. Beyond national Catholic narratives, The Imperial Church expands American Catholic history alongside American empire to the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish-Cuban-American War. Moran analyzes narratives used by local boosters and officials about Jacques Marquette in the Upper Midwest, Junípero Serra in California, and Spanish friars in the Philippines to show that Catholic figures represented a historical order than could be inherited and promoted by Protestants in establishing their own deeper imperial roots to justify and sustain American Empire. The Imperial Church seeks to show that "American Protestants … integrated Catholic missionaries and explorers into their efforts to commemorate a meaningful past" in the face of a rapidly changing U.S. present (7). Moran challenges historians to rethink how American empire and religion are assumed to interact in this era. The book is divided into three sections, with two chapters each. Section one centers commemorative culture honoring Marquette, "the first white man" in the Upper Midwest, whose gentle braveness civilized indigenous peoples (18). Marquette's peaceful conquest leant Midwesterners a bloodless imperial domination to guide their growing [End Page 63] economic strength and identity. Section two casts Serra and the California missions as a civilizing influence built around hospitality and labor management, reimbodied in the contemporary tourism industry. Moran rightly notes that this narrative erased Mexicans claims on California and, of course, the Mexican bodies that remained in the region. Section three focuses on the ways Spanish friars of centuries past were embraced by Americans seeking to harness those civilizing forces in support of an American imperial future in the Philippines. "Americanized Catholicism was embraced by Protestants and Catholics alike as a potential carrier of Christianity and American civilization," Moran writes (200). The book is well-organized and well-argued. Each section analyzes the commemorative culture of the relevant site and then considers the shifting discourse from anti-Catholicism to imperial foundations. Each section is strong and sections one and two work well together in reframing Marquette and Serra as "founding fathers" in their respective regions. For me, there is a bit of slippage between these sections based in the United States and the final section on the Philippines. The first two sections correlate more closely with the idea of founding fathers, while the third section more closely adheres to the notion of an American Imperial Catholic Church. Moran notes that the "buffer" between lionizing local Catholic historical figures "without fully embracing the idea of Catholic clerical authority" collapsed in the Philippines case; "Americanized priests and prelates were envisioned as replacements for the friar" (174). The "local" element of the Philippines case does not correlate well to the self-promotion projects carried out in the Upper Midwest and California. The transition between these different forms of Catholic reclamation might be better articulated in the text. In spite of this friction, this is a compelling study, firmly based in diligent archival research. This would be a fine contributor to courses on U.S. colonialism and empire, as well as American and U.S. Catholic history. [End Page 64] Anne M. Martinez Rijksuniversiteit Groningen Copyright © 2022 American Catholic Historical Society

“And How Pretty They Are!”: Lawn Tennis, Tourism, and Gender Relations at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, 1880s-1920s

In the four decades straddling the turn of the nineteenth century, the small Ontario town of Niagara-on-the-Lake experienced marked growth in its tourism industry. Catering predominantly to wealthy upper-middle-class Canadian and American visitors, the lake-side settlement offered numerous opportunities for polite recreation. Chief among them was lawn tennis, a sport that sat somewhat outside of the mainstream in terms of its high-class, mixed-sex participation demographic. While its players were imbued with a strong amateur philosophy, local boosters recognized the sport’s potential to generate tourism income through its two tournaments, but this hinged on the outward presentation among its players/guests of refined gentility—a reflection of both class and gender—both on and off the court. This article considers how lawn tennis tournaments fit into the town’s burgeoning tourism industry, and examines gender relations—particularly the role of women—in relation to this development.

Lone Star Suburbs: Life on the Texas Metropolitan Frontier ed. by Paul J.P. Sandul and M. Scott Sosebee

Reviewed by: Lone Star Suburbs: Life on the Texas Metropolitan Frontier ed. by Paul J.P. Sandul and M. Scott Sosebee Yu Han Lone Star Suburbs: Life on the Texas Metropolitan Frontier. Edited by Paul J. P. Sandul and M. Scott Sosebee. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. Pp. xii, 250. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-6447-2.) Texas is a state I have been very interested in and have kept a close eye on for many years, simply because, for more than half a century, it has been a shining star in the Sun Belt, and even in the whole nation, in terms of solid and rapid economic and metropolitan growth. However, the metropolitan areas of Texas do not seem to be popular subjects for historians, for whom the focus has been on the "'Texas Myth,'" one "dominated by cowboys, the frontier, Texas Rangers, and above all the Alamo and the Texas Revolution" (p. 4). Obviously, Texas metropolitan areas, especially the booming suburbs, have not gotten the attention they deserve. This volume, edited by Paul J. P. Sandul and M. Scott Sosebee, is the first book featuring the comprehensive story of suburban Texas, which includes essays on planning, politics, governing, ethno-racial diversity, transportation, religion, and environmentalism. The first essay, by Sandul, serves as the introduction to this volume, and it explores the historiography of the Lone Star State, especially suburban Texas and the suburban demographic situation, in detail. The historiographical section is successful and informative, but other parts are not. Some readers might not be satisfied with the census population data as the only material used to describe the rise of Texas suburbs after World War II. Other essays are uneven in quality. The best one is the second essay, by Robert B. Fairbanks, an established urban historian, who examines suburban planning in the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area in detail. He challenges, with concrete evidence, the conventional view that suburban cities are accidental or not well [End Page 760] planned. The suburbs examined are "intentional communities nurtured by their energetic civic leadership, shaped by their location within a growing metropolitan area, and formatted by professional urban planners hired by local booster governments to create what became a new urban form—suburban cities" (p. 62). The third essay, by Andrew C. Baker, presents readers with a struggle between city and suburb in Chateau Woods, a small rural subdivision north of Houston. This struggle was a response to the issues of incorporation and annexation, which have been raised by Kenneth T. Jackson in Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York, 1985) but have been neglected by historians for many years. In Baker's view, "the story of Chateau Woods serves as a case study in the perils of hyper-local, amateur-led democracy," and "incorporation was not always an answer to suburban problems on the metropolitan fringe" (pp. 87, 88). Three essays discuss the suburbanization of two ethnic groups in Texas. Chapters 4 and 9 focus on the migration of African Americans to the suburbs of Dallas and San Antonio, respectively. These two essays are narratives detailing African American migration patterns but lack analysis of the effects of migration on the employment and education of African Americans in suburbs, which is often a significant part of black suburbanization; chapter 4 does mention the influence of black poverty in the city. Compared with the suburbanization of African Americans, the suburbanization of Asian Americans is a fairly new phenomenon. Chapter 10 tells the story of the formation of an "ethnoburb," a new Asian community in Texas, with an emphasis on the Vietnamese in Houston. Son Mai argues that the development of this neighborhood was for economic activity and cultural preservation, rather than protection against racial discrimination. This essay, without any firsthand resources, is quite weak in terms of originality. Chapter 5, by Tom McKinney, provides a detailed account of the development of transportation facilities in Texas, including the background, process, and effects of construction of urban freeway systems during the suburbanization of the Lone Star State. As the title of this chapter, "The Czars of Concrete: The Texas Highway Department's Engineer-Manager Program and the Development...

Rethinking Tasmania’s Regionality from an Antarctic Perspective: Flipping the Map

Tasmania hangs from the map of Australia like a drop in freefall from the substance of the mainland. Often the whole state is mislaid from Australian maps and logos (Reddit). Tasmania has, at least since federation, been considered peripheral—a region seen as isolated, a ‘problem’ economically, politically, and culturally. However, Tasmania not only cleaves to the ‘north island’ of Australia but is also subject to the gravitational pull of an even greater land mass—Antarctica. In this article, we upturn the political conventions of map-making that place both Antarctica and Tasmania in obscure positions at the base of the globe. We show how a changing global climate re-frames Antarctica and the Southern Ocean as key drivers of worldwide environmental shifts. The liquid and solid water between Tasmania and Antarctica is revealed not as a homogenous barrier, but as a dynamic and relational medium linking the Tasmanian archipelago with Antarctica. When Antarctica becomes the focus, the script is flipped: Tasmania is no longer on the edge, but core to a network of gateways into the southern land. The state’s capital of Hobart can from this perspective be understood as an "Antarctic city", central to the geopolitics, economy, and culture of the frozen continent (Salazar et al.). Viewed from the south, we argue, Tasmania is not a problem, but an opportunity for a form of ecological, cultural, economic, and political sustainability that opens up the southern continent to science, discovery, and imagination.

Coal and Steel, Goodbye to All That

Displaced industrial workers frequently reflect upon the landscape of their former workplaces with unease. These sites, whether left in ruin or put to “creative re-use,” come to represent the symbolic displacement of working-class cultures and concerns. When working-class men and women try to influence the development of such sites through public history interventions, they frequently come into conflict with the desires of community developers, local boosters, or pro-business organizations. This article traces the barriers faced by former steelworkers in Sydney, Nova Scotia, in their attempt to establish a museum dedicated to the history of their steel mill. Although their efforts ultimately failed, this article reflects upon the contestations that are at the heart of commemorating the industrial past, the role of class in mediating public history, and the role of the state in rectifying the many inequities wrought by deindustrialization.

A Marvelous Machine: Creative Approaches to Securing Funding and Building Public Support for Streetcar Projects in Four U.S. Cities

The resurgence of streetcars in American cities has presented planners and civic leaders with a novel means of transportation and redevelopment for cities, many of which have a history of failed regional transit votes and suburban domination of regional planning bodies. To overcome these political and financial obstacles, supporters have engaged in a host of creative strategies to satisfy or bypass streetcar critics. Using a case study of four American cities with recently built streetcars (Atlanta, Cincinnati, Kansas City, and Tucson), this paper explores these strategies from the perspective of streetcar supporters. Results indicate streetcar projects in these cities were pursued in part because each city had faced at least one failed rail-transit vote in recent years (usually involving light rail). Supporters of streetcar plans anticipated vocal citizen opposition based on those past failures; however, in most cases this did not materialize to the expected degree. This suggests that narrowly focused and lower-cost streetcar projects can avoid the contentious opposition of pricey regional light-rail proposals by offering a different product and/or seeking fewer local dollars. Results also indicate widespread distrust for regional planning structures and a willingness of local boosters to bypass those entities and apply directly for federal funds. Although not all four cities ended up with the streetcar they envisioned, the findings nevertheless document an eagerness on the part of proponents to seek transit projects that transform public opinion, circumvent a burdensome regional planning process, and take advantage of a national funding environment willing to fund streetcars in urban areas.

Full-court press: How segregationist newspapers covered the championship season of an integrated Virginia high school basketball team

This qualitative study examines how two small Virginia newspapers that had opposed school integration covered an integrated high school boys basketball team that won a state championship three years after the school admitted African American students. While previous studies of sports journalism have found evidence of racial bias in the depiction of black athletes, this study finds values governing community journalism, including local boosterism, trumped racial bias.

Ultra-low temperature district heating system with central heat pump and local boosters for low-heat-density area: Analyses on a real case in Denmark

Low temperature district heating (DH) system gives easier access to the renewable energy as heat sources and improves the heat distribution efficiency. From the exergy point of view, low DH supply temperature also better matches the exergy demand of space heating and domestic hot water. It is more beneficial to operate district heating system under lower temperature level for the heat-sparse area where the distribution losses accounts for a large proportion in the total heat supply. In this study, the actual performance of a case ultra-low temperature district heating (ULTDH) system in Denmark was investigated based on long-term measurements. The system combines the central heat pump and local boosters, while the impact of such configuration on the overall system performance was analysed. The energy, exergy and economy performances of the case system were compared to medium temperature district heating system (MTDH) and low-temperature district heating system (LTDH). The results show that the LTDH system without supplementary heating has the highest energy and exergy efficiency. While the ULTDH system has better performance compared to the MTDH system in energy, exergy and economy due to substantial savings from the distribution heat loss.

Does Local News Side With Local Organizations? A Case Study of Boosterism and Dependence on Local and National Sources

This case study examines how local news tends to represent a crisis of a local organization differently from national news. Based on reviewing literature on local news boosterism, this study suggests a couple of reasons for differences between local and national news coverage: local source organizations’ boosting the city’s economy and symbolic values and variability in dependence on organizational sources by local news. When a local organization faces a crisis, local news media tend to cover issues more supportively than do national news media. Content analyses of local and national news about the crisis for the Baltimore Ravens professional football team related to player Ray Rice’s domestic violence case in 2014 show positive relationships between dependence on organizational sources and more supportive coverage on local news than that of national news. Local and national news both employed the frames of economic consequences and symbolic boosterism, but in different ways. Theoretical and practical implications are presented in the discussion.

The Many Lives of Justiniano Roxas: The Centenarian Fantasy in American History and Memory

The Many Lives of Justiniano Roxas:The Centenarian Fantasy in American History and Memory Boyd Cothran (bio) and Martin Rizzo (bio) SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA. December 1873. The sweet smell of burning redwood met the visitors as they entered the small apartment. The last rays of the winter solstice shone through the window, casting gossamer shadows across the bare pine floor. Earlier that morning, the old man had attended mass at the Holy Cross Church, one of the original twenty-one California missions. But on this cool afternoon, the elderly Justiniano Roxas sat on the floor of his twelve-by-six-foot suite at the county hospital on Mission Hill. He huddled close to the fire, surrounded by chopped wood, and he sewed a patch onto his coat.1 Residents of the central California coastal village of Santa Cruz had known of Roxas for some time. A recent illness had forced him to seek the aid of the Sisters of Charity, who, for their own reasons, took on his care, placing him in the county hospital, which they managed. Roxas received a room, a warm fire, and regular access to food and tea. And then the sisters informed the local newspaper of their benevolence. The Sisters of Charity had saved "the oldest living inhabitant on the face of the globe!" they said. He was, they claimed, 121 years old and "the last of his race."2 The Santa Cruz Sentinel sent a reporter to interview Roxas. But when the reporter entered the room, Roxas remained quiet. The parish priest of Santa Cruz, Father Joaquin Adam, accompanied the reporter. He approached the elderly man and placed his hand upon his shoulder. He might have whispered, "Mi hijo, tienes invitados." With a jerk, the old man woke from his thoughts and, according to the reporter, "looked around and commenced jabbering in Spanish to the Father—shaking his head at every word." The reporter was convinced that the Indian, hoary and frail, was aged. But could he really be 121 years old? To prove the sisters' claim, Father Adam produced the mission's baptismal record and translated it for the reporter. As the Sentinel later reported, the entry read: "On the 4th of March, of 1792, in this church of the Mission of Santa Cruz, I [Father Isidro Salazar] solemnly baptized a man of about 40 years belonging to a ranch, who I name Justiniano Roxas now." The man who was described in the baptismal record and the [End Page 168] man who was in the Santa Cruz hospital were, the newspaper declared, one and the same. "The testimony on this point is conclusive," it reported. In the early 1870s Santa Cruz was gaining a reputation for being a healthy town. Local boosters claimed that its "benign" climate extended life and rejuvenated the infirm. The survival of Justiniano Roxas, they now began to boast, was living proof.3 This article is the story of that old man in the county hospital. It is part archival mystery and part methodological essay. As a self-reflective examination of a joint scholarly endeavor, it is a story about how two historians worked together to unearth and discover the tale of an Indigenous man whose true-life story is far more interesting than any fictional account. But it is also a meditation on the meaning of Indigenous survival in California history. In a state notorious for its history of genocide and renowned for its famous "last" Indians, unexpected stories of survival remain hidden in plain sight. This article, then, is about what can be gained from reconstructing, piece by piece, the lives of those individuals who claimed to be centenarians. It is also about what can be gained when historians work together to look beyond the fantastical headlines and invest the time and energy necessary to understand the real person behind these fantasies. This is the story of the many lives of Justiniano Roxas. ________ The story of Justiniano Roxas begins with a critical engagement with Jean O'Brien's concept of "lasting" as an analytical lens. In basic terms, "lasting" describes a practice among nineteenth-century New Englanders, especially antiquarians and local community leaders, of marking the...

“Perfectly Positioned”: The Blurring of Urban, Suburban, and Rural Boundaries in a Southern Community

In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork and formal interviews from a community study in Rockdale County, Georgia, to illustrate the social construction of place-based identity within the rural-urban interface. Given decades of growth and expansion in metro Atlanta, Rockdale has become an object lesson of the boundary shifting and crossing typical of places located along the rural-urban fringe. A sustained pattern of demographic and ecological change in Rockdale has resulted in a lack of consensus about how to imagine the community’s location on the rural-urban continuum. I show how symbolic and social boundaries between urbanity and rurality are blurred within the community as residents draw on local resources to construct alternatively urban, suburban, and rural identities. Additionally, I illustrate how local boosters take advantage of this blurriness to portray Rockdale County as a “perfectly positioned” community and how community members disregard the official rural-urban boundaries of governments or scholars and instead invest their own imagined boundaries with significant meaning.

PUMP GROUP AUTOMATIC CONTROL FOR REDUCING ITS ENERGY CONSUMPTION

Booster pumping plants, equipped with a group of pump units operating in parallel, are typical objects of the city water supply system. Improving its power efficiency is a very urgent topical objective, because its power consumption is a significant part in the structure of power consumption of water utilities. The aim of the present study is to identify opportunities of improving the power efficiency of pumping stations due to the automatic control of the pump group. The paper presents results of the study of the instantaneous efficiency changes of booster pumping stations under the conditions of variable water consumption. The basic reasons of the reducing pumping plant efficiency are reported in the article. Among them, there is a sharp decline in the effectiveness of the regulated pump units, when they functioning for the hydraulic network with a significant static component of the pressure. The main factors affecting the duration of the adjustable pumping unit in inefficient area are determined. The method of controlling a group of pumping units, taking into account the instantaneous efficiency of each of them was suggested. The approbation of this method at the local booster pumping stations was fulfilled. The effects of disabling the controlled pump unit which is in the ineffective area, on the overall efficiency of the pumping station and on alteration of its output pressure immediately after the pump is switched off are studied. It was shown that the timely shutdown of an inefficiently controlled pump unit can reduce the power consumption of the pumping plant by 8–10 % as compared to the traditional control methods. The range of variation of the instantaneous efficiency of the pumping station can serve as a criterion of correct selection of pumping equipment as well it can be the rationale of the necessity for its replacement.