Journal of Interdisciplinary History最新文献

{"title":"Degrees of Equality: Abolitionist Colleges and the Politics of Race by John Frederick Bell","authors":"Mark Boonshoft","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01923","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01923","url":null,"abstract":"and macroeconomic levels of analysis. His microeconomic perspective on immigration suggests that the local impact of immigration on the job market is mixed and not nearly as disruptive to less privileged Americans as some critics, such as Borjas, have sometimes claimed. He finds the macroeconomic effect of immigration even more positive because in an open economy immigration contributes to efficiency and productivity. Kane also addresses critics who charge that newcomers from abroad pose a threat to the culture of the American people. Nativists see in the nation’s increasing cultural diversity a threat best neutralized by exclusion. Kane, however, sees cultural diversity as an American strength that was present from the earliest days of the country’s history. He deplores the contemporary conflating of immigration and racial-identity politics, focusing instead upon “the common unity of ideas embodied in [the United States’] founding documents,” such as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (13). At times, Kane’s pro-immigration argument seems unrelentingly positive. His focus on the long-term benefits of immigration causes him to pay scant attention to its short-term burdens on local communities. Therefore, he does not adequately address immigration reform from the perspective of redistributing the immediate costs of settling newcomers into homes, jobs, and schools. Kane’s abundant evidence in support of immigration’s importance in shaping America’s strength and prosperity throughout its history fuels a persuasive argument that will engage scholars in think tanks and classrooms. It will also stoke the fire of an already heated contemporary debate about current policies.","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"53 1","pages":"659-661"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64386382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"East Africa after Liberation: Conflict, Security, and the State since the 1980s by Jonathan Fisher","authors":"Christopher Day","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01931","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01931","url":null,"abstract":"epistemological chasm between the men. He quotes a frustrated Scott lamenting obliquely in the Mission’s newsletter shortly before his ouster that “nothing saps a man’s strength like prejudice” (196). Nothing in what Englund writes suggests that Hetherwick was a stalking horse for the extreme segregation prevalent in southern Africa a half-century later. This book insists, however, that “Hetherwick’s leadership erased any alternatives that Scott’s vision may have suggested” for a more egalitarian society in Central Africa (264). Nonetheless, as a methodological tour de force, Visions for Racial Equality exceeds in both scope and execution another intellectual biography, that of T. Cullen Young, another otherwise neglected Scottish missionary in central Africa. In so doing, Englund opens a much richer view to the history, and historiography, of Malawi.","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"93 1","pages":"671-673"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91072673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power by James Walvin","authors":"P. Manning","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01909","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01909","url":null,"abstract":"Walvin’s concise review of slavery in the Atlantic argues that slavery has transformed the West or, indeed, the world to the present day. Chapters in six sections include overviews of Iberian and northern European slave systems, examples from the Middle Passage, slave trade within Brazil and the United States, “managing slavery,” the campaign for freedom, and the argument about the world transformed by slavery—as seen through sugar, tobacco, servile labor, and plantation economies. Walvin’s purpose for writing the book was to restate the history of slavery in support of the discourse around Black Lives Matter. The book’s most original observations are signaled at the opening of the concluding chapter: “The furore which swept round the globe in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in May 2020 brought slavery back into widespread public debate.” In Walvin’s words, “Critics everywhere were swift to point out that the origins of that injustice lay deep in the history of relations between Black and white ... [and] the history of slavery” (331). As he suggests, public discourse turns to history when the issues become most painful and difficult. Walvin argues that the intensity of the reaction to Floyd’s death was reinforced by an earlier debate. “The 1619 Project,” a series published in New York Times Magazine, appeared in 2019 with the 400th anniversary of the delivery of African captives to Virginia. These essays, which reviewed U.S. history through the lens of slavery, prompted heated discussion among Americans of varied backgrounds, but they made virtually no reference to history outside the United States. Walvin argues, however, that this renewed interest in U.S. slavery ignited a global debate that linked police violence worldwide to reminders of social inequity, to statues of imperial generals, and to the wealth garnered by powerful families and institutions from the work of forced laborers. Having argued that statements about the past of slavery and inequality need to be updated, Walvin turns to the historical background underlying the explosion of Black Lives Matter. He begins with World War II, in which people from all over the world fought the Axis powers, after which the inhabitants of colonies were able to claim the rights of national citizens. He acknowledges that the U.S. civil-rights movement of that era performed a similar function: “In the USA, the reconstruction of the Black past lifted slavery out of its essentially regional setting.”","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"53 1","pages":"635-636"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47147450","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Boundaries of Freedom: Slavery, Abolition, and the Making of Modern Brazil Edited by Brodwyn Fischer and Keila Grinberg","authors":"Dale T. Graden","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01928","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01928","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"53 1","pages":"666-668"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47542045","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Grammar of Civil War: A Mexican Case Study, 1857–61 by Will Fowler","authors":"","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01927","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01927","url":null,"abstract":"This book grows out of Fowler’s previous studies of the forceful negotiations that dominated the early political life of nineteenth-century Mexico. Known as pronunciamientos, these tense affairs usually ended without cataclysmic violence and led to concessions and agreement between the contending factions. In short, Fowler has already demonstrated how democracy by other means functioned in Mexico. Such was not the case with the War of Reform from 1857 to 1861, in which the fighting claimed approximately 200,000 lives. The Grammar of Civil War explores how and why this exceptional violence came to pass. But Fowler has more than the history of Mexico on his mind this time around. After all, his previous monograph, La Guerra de Tres Años, 1857–1861 (Mexico City, 2020) delves fully into that conflict as a singular military episode. The titular “grammar” of his present study amounts to an analytical framework that Fowler proposes for the study of any modern civil conflict around the world. He maintains that the deployment of this model can explicate even such far-flung events as the seventeenthcentury English Civil War and the twenty-first-century Syrian civil war. Fowler begins by drawing from the contributions of political scientists like Kalyvas, Sambanis, and Conteh-Morgan to develop his definition of civil war. Crudely summarized, civil wars are conflicts located within the bounds of a nation-state that features a single government prior to the commencement of hostilities. They also involve at least two warring parties—one of which enjoys government sponsorship. Finally, civil wars require competing political factions that lay claim to national authority, sustained military operations, and a significant death toll of military and civilian lives on each side (7). Fowler closes his introduction by elucidating a tripartite framework for understanding how civil wars begin, the internal dynamics that compel people to continue fighting once war has begun, and the ways in which civil wars end. Each of these components receives consistent and clear explanation in a chapter of its own. To understand how civil wars begin, Fowler examines the macro-transnational sphere alongside the national-regional context, which encompasses structural contributing factors, social divides, ideological disputes, and cultural concerns. Amid these swirling forces, an activation period that is difficult to predict and even more challenging to defuse commences. He identifies eight unique but linked components that must become manifest before the preceding stress factors culminate in a civil war.","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"53 1","pages":"665-666"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49259241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>The Globalization of Wheat: A Critical History of the Green Revolution</i> by Marci R. Baranski","authors":"Peter A. Coclanis","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01980","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01980","url":null,"abstract":"For several decades, scholars, journalists, and activists have been beavering away to overturn triumphalist narratives regarding the Green Revolution. Earlier generations of observers had generally written positively about the revolution and its leading figures, especially U.S. crop scientist Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.This revolution involved a series of advancements in agriculture between World War II and the late 1980s that led to large increases in cereal grain output—wheat and rice primarily—in various less-developed parts of the world. The increases were the result mainly of the introduction of high-yielding crop varieties (hyvs) used in combination with a technological “package,” marked by increased use of fertilizer, enhanced irrigation works, and, often, greater mechanization.The context for these developments was the perceived need for massive increases in grain production at a time of rapid population growth in already food-insecure parts of the world. The impetus and funding for the Green Revolution must be viewed in the context of the Cold War, as governmental authorities in developed countries devised strategies designed to modernize the agricultural sectors in potentially restive less developed countries (ldcs), thereby lessening the chances of revolutionary upheaval. The preferred instruments for such strategies were crop scientists and development experts, whether working in the public sector—at universities and governmental research facilities—or under the auspices of non-governmental organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Over time, specialized international agricultural research centers emerged to oversee, direct, coordinate, and disseminate “Green Revolution” research. Many of these centers today operate in partnership with an overall coordinating body known as cgiar (Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research).The garden-variety critique of the Green Revolution sees it as a top-down, modernist, and overly technocratic effort orchestrated mainly by “experts” from the developed world that, despite the hype, underperformed in numerous ways almost everywhere it was tried. For example, the increased use of fertilizers and increased importance of irrigation works generally resulted in negative environmental externalities, and the promotion of cereal grains often crowded out production of more nutritious foods. It is alleged that the benefits of the Green Revolution, such as they were, accrued mainly to large commercial farmers who were plugged into agricultural research networks and could afford the necessary “package” of hyvs, fertilizer, irrigation, and mechanized equipment. As a result, rural poverty persisted and undernutrition continued to plague the populations in most areas where the revolution left its mark.The author of this book offers yet another, but different, critical interpretation of the Green Revolution, providing fresh insights to reade","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134981408","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World</i> by Katherine Johnston","authors":"Ryan Fontanilla","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01982","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01982","url":null,"abstract":"The notion that African bodies survived in hot, wet tropical climates longer and better than European bodies was a cornerstone of white slaveowners’ thought and practice in the Atlantic world. It justified the disproportionate exposure of enslaved African men, women, and children to unhealthy, disease-ridden, and hazardous living and working conditions. This racist doctrine directly contributed to the premature deaths of millions of Black people.Although no serious scholar today openly entertains the idea that race has a material basis in human biology, this book makes clear that historical studies of race and environment have far too often taken at face value the biological rationale of white slaveowners. Studies that test immunity of African- and Creole-born populations to yellow fever and malaria over that of new arrivals from Europe are emblematic of this tendency. These studies unwittingly reinforce the spurious logic of biological race, a notion which assumes an almost transhistorical character of static, unbroken continuity.Johnston’s exciting and timely work forces us to reconsider how we tell histories of race and environment. It reveals that slaveowners and colonial officials repudiated the evidence that environmental and labor conditions, not race, were the primary determinants of death and survival in the tropics. This disavowal facilitated the binary division of Black and white bodies into separate classes of human being, in accordance with a climate-based theory of fixed, immutable racial difference. In the process, the historical development of climatic theories of race over time was effaced and replaced with hollow racial tautologies. To recover this history, Johnston revisits key periods in the expansion of African slavery in the West Indies, colonial Georgia and South Carolina, and the antebellum United States, examining the disjuncture of what contemporaries admitted privately to one another with what they avowed in public forums about the non-racial bases of mortality in plantation colonies.Climatic-racial discourse remained fluid, contested, and amorphous until the early nineteenth century. Whites privately acknowledged in personal correspondence and medical treatises that the survival of newcomers to tropical colonies depended upon “seasoning”—receiving sufficient food, becoming slowly habituated to novel environmental conditions, avoiding the most physically taxing work on plantations—irrespective of race. Observers identified unwise personal habits (such as excessive alcohol consumption) and settlement decisions (such as placing human abodes too close to marshlands and disease-causing miasmas) as more accurate predictors of death for Europeans and Africans equally. It was not uncommon for whites to emphasize that tropical environments were indeed beneficial to the bodily health of Europeans.In public-facing discourse, however, contemporaries appropriated the climatic rhetoric of race to serve the economic imperatives of ca","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134981409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>The Remaking of Republican Turkey: Memory and Modernity since the Fall of the Ottoman Empire</i> by Nicholas L. Danforth","authors":"Hale Yılmaz","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01997","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01997","url":null,"abstract":"The 1940s and 1950s are commonly viewed as a transformative period in Turkish history. The era witnessed Turkey’s transition from an authoritarian single-party regime to a multi-party democratic political system, a shift to a model of rapid capitalist economic modernization, and integration into the U.S.-led Western bloc in the early Cold War. The period ended abruptly with a military coup. Whether interpreted as a reversal of the early republic’s secularizing reforms and secular institutions or as a return to more representative Turkish cultural institutions and practices, scholars have considered the late 1940s and 1950s as a time of intense cultural and ideological contestation about Turkish identity and modernity between secular republicans and Islamist conservatives.In this book, Danforth offers an original perspective on 1950s Turkey, arguing that the mid-century was a time when groups articulated differing visions and new syntheses of Turkish modernity, rather than being stuck in a secular authoritarian vs. religious conservatism divide. In doing so, Danforth draws on a wide range of primary sources such as newspapers, magazines, memoirs, literary works, U.S. government documents, and private documents, including former prime minister Bülent Ecevit’s personal papers at the Ecevit Foundation in Ankara.The book is organized thematically, with each one of the seven chapters focusing on a particular aspect relating to Turkish modernity, such as foreign policy, Turkey’s Ottoman past, Turkey’s Arab neighbors, and religious reform. Danforth seeks to provide new interpretations and correctives to the standard accounts of the 1950s by moving beyond the secular vs. religious and the authoritarian rpp (Republican People’s Party) vs. liberal democratic dp (Democratic Party) dichotomies.Danforth is especially interested in understanding the relationship between ideas and politics in Turkey after World War II. This focus is most evident in the first two chapters, where he discusses Turkish and American visions of democracy and modernization within the context of an evolving Turkish-American alignment and American support for the Menderes government in the 1950s. Danforth argues that Turkish intellectuals and politicians quickly adjusted their ideas about democracy and the West in response to changing internal and global circumstances, paralleling altering views of American diplomats to align with American interests.In Chapter 3, Danforth explores the different conceptions of Turkish modernity as articulated by a number of famous and lesser-known writers, journalists, feminists, diplomats, lawyers, and medical doctors in a broad spectrum of publications. Danforth finds a common effort among these authors to overcome and reconcile East-West and similar divides, striving to attain a new synthesis of Turkish modernity. This effort is evident in the alternative visions of modernity expressed by these authors, whether in embracing American modernity over the ","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134981421","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America</i> by Pekka Hämäläinen","authors":"Andrew K. Frank","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01996","url":null,"abstract":"In this sweeping synthesis, Hämäläinen tells a continental story, one that centers the enduring presence and power of America’s Indigenous peoples across centuries. Pushing back against narratives of declension and erasure, Hämäläinen reminds readers that North America “remained overwhelmingly Indigenous well into the nineteenth century.” Instead of focusing on “colonial America,” he writes “we should speak of an Indigenous America that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial” (ix).The central argument of the book will not surprise readers who are familiar with recent early American historiography. Many scholars have demonstrated that North America remained “Native Ground” for much longer than historians once acknowledged, and many U.S. history textbooks now routinely center Indigenous people in the history of what Wulf dubbed “vast Early America.” Perhaps in the pursuit of reaching a non-scholarly audience, Hämäläinen unfortunately does not directly acknowledge this literature, despite largely relying on some of it for his evidence and argument. He instead casts his argument against the myth that white European colonists rapidly dominated the New World after their arrival.The book struggles to escape the contradiction between its title and subtitle. For as much as the rhetoric of the volume emphasizes the enduring “Indigenous Continent,” the book focuses on the diplomatic events and military battles that ultimately tilted the balance of power in this “epic contest for North America.” The story of resistance and dispossession unfolds without equal attention to who was resisting or what was being dispossessed. As the volume proceeds, its geographic scope shrinks, the contest becomes increasingly defined by the dominance of the United States, and the “Indigenous Continent” becomes less continental.Hämäläinen resolves this contradiction in a way that pushes back on one of the major trends of recent Indigenous history. Whereas a generation of scholars has detailed how North America remained Indigenous space long after the nineteenth century, Hämäläinen describes a world where Native Americans gradually lost their power in a westward fashion. The volume even ends roughly when the census revealed to Frederick Jackson Turner that the frontier had closed. Exceptions like the discussion of the Pueblo Revolt disrupt the Turnerian feel, and Hämäläinen describes prolonged and successful Indigenous resistance as he carries the narrative west (183–186). These discussions, though, ultimately leave no space to explore the enduring power or presence of Indigenous people. The Eastern Woodlands, for instance, appear near the start of the volume but the Powhatans and various Algonquian speakers receive little attention after the eighteenth century. Indian Removal cuts the story of the southeast off in the 1830s, with the Cherokees and other Native Southerners hardly appearing at all afterward. The story on the Plains similarly comes to an all-too-familiar end","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134981579","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>Hella Town: Oakland’s History of Development and Disruption</i> by Mitchell Schwarzer","authors":"Robert O. Self","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01993","url":null,"abstract":"Oakland, California, situated across the bay from San Francisco, is the quintessential second city. It is, depending on the metaphor of choice, in the shadow of, little sibling to, or the grittier neighbor of its more celebrated urban counterpart. But those metaphors—to say nothing of the greatest cliché of all, Gertrude Stein’s “there is no there there” dismissal of the city—grew outworn long ago. Oakland is a city like any other, deserving of its own history and commentary, independent from constant comparison with San Francisco.Schwarzer offers just such a history in this rollicking, sprawling compendium of, in the words of its subtitle, the development and disruption of Oakland from the 1890s to the present. Focusing on the built environment, this book is primarily about parks, automobiles, highways, and housing, with some mass transit, shopping centers, and urban renewal alongside. It is organized accordingly, with chapters such as “Streetcar Stratification,” “The Politics of Parks,” “Housing Injustice,” and so forth. Schwarzer has read just about everything ever written about Oakland—so it would seem—and he synthesizes a narrative that is both familiar to urban historians and capable of occasional surprises and enchantments.The book’s two chief attributes are its fidelity to Oakland, and to cities generally, as a site of constant creative destruction and its empirical detail. A massive interregional system of streetcar lines was barely up and running before it was outdated, its private business model and fixed tracks supplanted by the public financing of roads and highways and the unfixed ambit of the automobile, truck, and bus. Downtown Oakland suffered from disinvestment and the effects of regional decentralization and subsequently turned to federal urban renewal as a lifeboat—before creeping gentrification saved it in the twenty-first century.That these stories of development and disruption are relatively familiar to urban scholars—as are the many other stories found in the book, of sports arenas, highway construction, housing segregation, commercial decentralization, deindustrialization, and so on—does not diminish their importance here. What is more, Schwarzer tackles them with an attention to empirical detail and specificity that will please even the most demanding local historian. Close readers will also find gems in those details. “The City of Oakland never fashioned a grand and accessible urban park, akin to Golden Gate Park,” Schwarzer writes, not because of a dearth of design plans (the noted urban planner Charles Mulford Robinson penned such a recommendation in his 1906 A Plan for Civic Improvement for the City of Oakland, California) but because of city council dithering (117). To this day, the best local parks are operated by the East Bay Regional Park District, a cooperative endeavor of Alameda and Contra Coast Counties, not the City of Oakland.For all its exhaustive research and factual detail, this often feels like a book i","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134981417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}