The American West, from the beginning of Euro-American settlement, has been shaped by diverse ideas about how to utilize physical space and natural environments to create cohesive, sometimes exclusive community identities. When westerners developed their towns, they constructed spaces and cultural identities that reflected alternative understandings of modern urbanity. The essays in City Dreams, Country Schemes utilize an interdisciplinary approach to explore the ways that westerners conceptualized, built, and inhabited urban, suburban, and exurban spaces in the twentieth century. The contributors examine such topics as the attractions of open space and rural gentrification in shaping urban development; the role of tourism in developing national parks, historical sites, and California's Napa Valley; and the roles of public art, gender, and ethnicity in shaping urban centers. City Dreams, Country Schemes reveals the values and expectations that have shaped the West and the lives of the people who inhabit it.

A Companion to Dwight D. Eisenhower brings new depth to the historiography of this significant and complex figure, providing a comprehensive and up-to-date depiction of both the man and era. Thoughtfully incorporates new and significant literature on Dwight D. Eisenhower Thoroughly examines both the Eisenhower era and the man himself, broadening the historical scope by which Eisenhower is understood and interpreted Presents a complete picture of Eisenhower’s many roles in historical context: the individual, general, president, politician, and citizen This Companion is the ideal starting point for anyone researching America during the Eisenhower years and an invaluable guide for graduate students and advanced undergraduates in history, political science, and policy studies Meticulously edited by a leading authority on the Eisenhower presidency with chapters by international experts on political, international, social, and cultural history

In the half century after World War II, California’s Santa Clara Valley transformed from a rolling landscape of fields and orchards into the nation’s most consequential high-tech industrial corridor. How Santa Clara Valley became Silicon Valley and came to embody both the triumphs and the failures of a new vision of the American West is the question Jason A. Heppler explores in this book. A revealing look at the significance of nature in social, cultural, and economic conceptions of place, the book is also a case study on the origins of American environmentalism and debates about urban and suburban sustainability. Between 1950 and 1990, business and community leaders pursued a new vision of the landscape stretching from Palo Alto to San Jose—a vision that melded the bucolic naturalism of orchards, pleasant weather, and green spaces with the metropolitan promise of modern industry, government-funded research, and technology. Heppler describes the success of a new, clean, future-facing economy, coupled with a pleasant, green environment, in drawing people to Silicon Valley. And in this overwhelming success, he also locates the rapidly emerging faults created by competing ideas about forming these idyllic communities—specifically, widespread environmental degradation and increasing social stratification. Cities organized around high-tech industries, suburban growth, and urban expansion were, as Heppler shows, crucibles for empowering elites, worsening human health, and spreading pollution. What do “nature” and “place” mean, and who gets to define these terms? Key to Heppler’s work is the idea that these questions reflect and determine what, and who, matters in any conversation about the environment. Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High-Tech Urbanism vividly traces that idea through the linked histories of Silicon Valley and environmentalism in the West.

In A Country of Cities, author Vishaan Chakrabarti argues that well-designed cities are the key to solving America's great national challenges: environmental degradation, unsustainable consumption, economic stagnation, rising public health costs and decreased social mobility. If we develop them wisely in the future, our cities can be the force leading us into a new era of progressive and prosperous stewardship of our nation. In compelling chapters, Chakrabarti brings us a wealth of information about cities, suburbs and exurbs, looking at how they developed across the 50 states and their roles in prosperity and globalization, sustainability and resilience, and heath and joy. Counter to what you might think, American cities today are growing faster than their suburban counterparts for the first time since the 1920s. If we can intelligently increase the density of our cities as they grow and build the transit systems, schools, parks and other infrastructure to support them, Chakrabarti shows us how both job opportunities and an improved, sustainable environment are truly within our means. In this call for an urban America, he illustrates his argument with numerous infographics illustrating provocative statistics on issues as disparate as rising childhood obesity rates, ever-lengthening automobile commutes and government subsidies that favor highways over mass transit. The book closes with an eloquent manifesto that rallies us to build "a Country of Cities," to turn a country of highways, houses and hedges into a country of trains, towers and trees. Vishaan Chakrabarti is an architect, scholar and founder of PAU. PAU designs architecture that builds the physical, cultural, and economic networks of cities, with an emphasis on beauty, function and user experience. PAU simultaneously advances strategic urbanism projects in the form of master planning, tactical project advice and advocacy.

Between the 1980s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, Asian Americans in Los Angeles moved toward becoming a racial majority in the communities of the East San Gabriel Valley. By the late 1990s, their "model minority" status resulted in greater influence in local culture, neighborhood politics, and policies regarding the use of suburban space. In the "country living" subdivisions, which featured symbols of Western agrarianism including horse trails, ranch fencing, and Spanish colonial architecture, white homeowners encouraged assimilation and enacted policies suppressing unwanted "changes"—that is, increased density and influence of Asian culture. While some Asian suburbanites challenged whites' concerns, many others did not. Rather, white critics found support from affluent Asian homeowners who also wished to protect their class privilege and suburbia's conservative Anglocentric milieu. In Resisting Change in Suburbia, award-winning historian James Zarsadiaz explains how myths of suburbia, the American West, and the American Dream informed regional planning, suburban design, and ideas about race and belonging.

This special collection aims to offer insight into the state of geography on questions of social justice and urban life. While using social justice and the city as our starting point may signal inspiration from Harvey’s (1973) book of the same name, the task of examining the emergence of this concept has revealed the deep influence of grassroots urban uprisings of the late 1960s, earlier and contemporary meditations on our urban worlds (Jacobs, 1961, 1969; Lefebvre, 1974; Massey and Catalano, 1978) as well as its enduring significance built upon by many others for years to come. Laws (1994) noted how geographers came to locate social justice struggles in the city through research that examined the ways in which material conditions contributed to poverty and racial and gender inequity, as well as how emergent social movements organized to reshape urban spaces across diverse engagements including the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, anti-war protests, feminist and LGBTQ activism, the American Indian Movement, and disability access. This book originally published as a special issue of Annals of the American Association of Geographers.

Creating the Suburban School Advantage explains how American suburban school districts gained a competitive edge over their urban counterparts. John L. Rury provides a national overview of the process, focusing on the period between 1950 and 1980, and presents a detailed study of metropolitan Kansas City, a region representative of trends elsewhere. While big-city districts once were widely seen as superior and attracted families seeking the best educational opportunities for their children, suburban school systems grew rapidly in the post–World War II era as middle-class and more affluent families moved to those communities. As Rury relates, at the same time, economically dislocated African Americans migrated from the South to center-city neighborhoods, testing the capacity of urban institutions. As demographic trends drove this urban-suburban divide, a suburban ethos of localism contributed to the socioeconomic exclusion that became a hallmark of outlying school systems. School districts located wholly or partly within the municipal boundaries of Kansas City, Missouri, make for revealing cases that illuminate our understanding of these national patterns. As Rury demonstrates, struggles to achieve greater educational equity and desegregation in urban centers contributed to so-called white flight and what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan considered to be a crisis of urban education in 1965. Despite the often valiant efforts made to serve inner city children and bolster urban school districts, this exodus, Rury cogently argues, created a new metropolitan educational hierarchy—a mirror image of the urban-centric model that had prevailed before World War II. The stubborn perception that suburban schools are superior, based on test scores and budgets, has persisted into the twenty-first century and instantiates today's metropolitan landscape of social, economic, and educational inequality.