The unique character of San Francisco's Chinatown is revealed in a historical map and fascinating photographs This colorful and playful time capsule of San Francisco's Chinatown shares the stories of the unique businesses, culture, and people encountered by map illustrator Ken Cathcart between 1939 and 1955. Each quadrant of the map, supplemented by never-before-seen black-and-white photographs and meticulous research, drops the reader into a world of curious characters that reveals a glimpse of the immigration story so universal to America in both its celebratory aspects and its darkness.

Public Los Angeles is a collection of unpublished essays by scholar Don Parson focusing on little-known characters and histories located in the first half of twentieth-century Los Angeles. An infamously private city in the eyes of outside observers, structured around single-family homes and an aggressively competitive regional economy, Los Angeles has often been celebrated or caricatured as the epitome of an American society bent on individualism, entrepreneurialism, and market ingenuity. But Don Parson presents a different vision for the vast Southern California metropolis, one that is deftly illustrated by stories of sustained struggles for social and economic justice led by activists, social workers, architects, housing officials, and a courageous judge. Public Los Angeles presents insights into LA's historic collectivism, networks of solidarity, and government policy. A follow-up to Parson's seminal Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles (2005), this volume helps shape our understanding of public housing, gender and housework, judicial activism, and race and class in modernday Los Angeles and asks us if history is repeating. Parson's work anchors a collection of nine essays by friends and mentors who deepen the discussion of his themes: Dana Cuff, Mike Davis, Steven Flusty, Greg Goldin, Jacqueline Leavitt, Laura Pulido, Sue Ruddick, Tom Sitton, Edward W. Soja, and Jennifer Wolch. The book is richly illustrated. Biographical and curatorial essays by the book's editors, Roger Keil and Judy Branfman, provide background material and a coherent storyline for a mosaic of fresh Los Angeles research.

Charr tells eloquently of his difficulties in becoming a naturalized citizen, even after serving in the army, of his sergeant's encouragement of his quest for citizenship, his return to San Francisco and a job in a cousin's barbershop during the Depression, and of the American Legion's help when his Korean-born wife was threatened with deportation proceedings after her student visa expired. After becoming a naturalized citizen, Charr took the civil service examination and, for the remainder of his working life, was employed by the U.S. government, first in Nevada and then in Portland, Oregon. The introduction and annotations by Wayne Patterson provide a broader perspective on both Charr and the Korean immigrant experience.

The arrival of immigrants on America's shores has always posed a singular problem: once they are here, how are these diverse peoples to be transformed into Americans? The Americanization movement of the 1910s and 1920s addressed this challenge by seeking to train immigrants for citizenship, representing a key element of the Progressives' "search for order" in a modernizing America. Frank Van Nuys examines for the first time how this movement, in an effort to help integrate an unruly West into the emerging national system, was forced to reconcile the myth of rugged individualism with the demands of a planned society. In an era convulsed by world war and socialist revolution, the Americanization movement was especially concerned about the susceptibility of immigrants to un-American propaganda and union agitation. As Van Nuys convincingly demonstrates, this applied as much to immigrants in the urbanizing and industrializing West as it did to those occupying the ethnic enclaves of cities in the East. In Americanizing the West he tells how hundreds of bureaucrats, educators, employers, and reformers participated in this movement by developing adult immigrant education programs-and how these attempts contributed more toward bureaucratizing the West than it did to turning immigrants into productive citizens. He deftly ties this history to broader national developments and shows how Westerners brought distinctive approaches to Americanization to accommodate and preserve their own sense of history and identity. Van Nuys shows that, although racism and social control agendas permeated Americanization efforts in the West, Americanizers sustained their faith in education as a powerful force in transforming immigrants into productive citizens. He also shows how some westerners-especially in California-believed they faced a "racial frontier" unlike other parts of the country in light of the influx of Hispanics and Asians, so that westerners became major players in the crafting of not only American identity but also immigration policies. The mystique of the white pioneer past still maintains a powerful hold on ideas of American identity, and we still deal with many of these issues through laws and propositions targeting immigrants and alien workers. Americanizing the West makes a clear case for regional distinctiveness in this citizenship program and puts current headlines in perspective by showing how it helped make the West what it is today.