The relationship between a town and its local institutions of higher education is often fraught with turmoil. The complicated tensions between the identity of a city and the character of a university can challenge both communities. Lexington, Kentucky, displays these characteristic conflicts, with two historic educational institutions within its city limits: Transylvania University, the first college west of the Allegheny Mountains, and the University of Kentucky, formerly “State College.” An investigative cultural history of the town that called itself “The Athens of the West,” Taking the Town: Collegiate and Community Culture in Lexington, Kentucky, 1880–1917 depicts the origins and development of this relationship at the turn of the twentieth century. Lexington’s location in the upper South makes it a rich region for examination. Despite a history of turmoil and violence, Lexington’s universities serve as catalysts for change. Until the publication of this book, Lexington was still characterized by academic interpretations that largely consider Southern intellectual life an oxymoron. Kolan Thomas Morelock illuminates how intellectual life flourished in Lexington from the period following Reconstruction to the nation’s entry into the First World War. Drawing from local newspapers and other primary sources from around the region, Morelock offers a comprehensive look at early town-gown dynamics in a city of contradictions. He illuminates Lexington’s identity by investigating the lives of some influential personalities from the era, including Margaret Preston and Joseph Tanner. Focusing on literary societies and dramatic clubs, the author inspects the impact of social and educational university organizations on the town’s popular culture from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era. Morelock’s work is an enlightening analysis of the intersection between student and citizen intellectual life in the Bluegrass city during an era of profound change and progress. Taking the Town explores an overlooked aspect of Lexington’s history during a time in which the city was establishing its cultural and intellectual identity.

List of members in each volume.

Beginning near the end of the nineteenth century, a generation of reformers set their sights on the growing Mexican community in Los Angeles. Experimenting with a variety of policies on health, housing, education, and labor, these reformers—settlement workers, educationalists, Americanizers, government officials, and employers—attempted to transform the Mexican community with a variety of distinct and often competing agendas. In Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles, Stephanie Lewthwaite presents evidence from a myriad of sources that these varied agendas of reform consistently supported the creation of racial, ethnic, and cultural differences across Los Angeles. Reformers simultaneously promoted acculturation and racialization, creating a “landscape of difference” that significantly shaped the place and status of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans from the Progressive era through the New Deal. The book journeys across the urban, suburban, and rural spaces of Greater Los Angeles as it moves through time and examines the rural–urban migration of Mexicans on both a local and a transnational scale. Part 1 traverses the world of Progressive reform in urban Los Angeles, exploring the link between the region’s territorial and industrial expansion, early campaigns for social and housing reform, and the emergence of a first-generation Mexican immigrant population. Part 2 documents the shift from official Americanization and assimilation toward nativism and exclusion. Here Lewthwaite examines competing cultures of reform and the challenges to assimilation from Mexican nationalists and American nativists. Part 3 analyzes reform during the New Deal, which spawned the active resistance of second-generation Mexican Americans. Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles achieves a full, broad, and nuanced account of the various—and often contradictory—efforts to reform the Mexican population of Los Angeles. With a transnational approach grounded in historical context, this book will appeal to students of history, cultural studies, and literary studies