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Why, Diane Davis asks, has Mexico City, once known as the city of palaces, turned into a sea of people, poverty, and pollution? Through historical analysis of Mexico City, Davis identifies political actors responsible for the uncontrolled industrialization of Mexico's economic and social center, its capital city. This narrative biography takes a perspective rarely found in studies of third-world urban development: Davis demonstrates how and why local politics can run counter to rational politics, yet become enmeshed, spawning ineffective policies that are detrimental to the city and the nation.

The competing social and economic demand of the working poor and middle classes and the desires of Mexico's ruling Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI) have led to gravely diminished services, exorbitant infrastructural expenditures, and counter-productive use of geographic space. Though Mexico City's urban transport system has evolved over the past seven decades from trolley to bus to METRO (subway), it fails to meet the needs of the population, despite its costliness, and is indicative of the city's disastrous and ill-directed overdevelopment. Examining the political forces behind the thwarted attempts to provide transportation in the downtown and sprawling outer residential areas, Davis analyzes the maneuverings of local and national politicians, foreign investors, middle classes, agency bureaucrats, and various factions of the PRI.

Looking to Mexico's future, Davis concludes that growing popular dissatisfaction and frequent urban protests demanding both democratic reform and administrative autonomy in the capital city suggest an unstable future for corporatist politics and the PRI's centralized one-party government.

If a city based its planning decisions on the needs of an international bureaucracy rather than on the traditional needs of local residents and businesses, how would that city change? How might it look?

In Brussels, Belgium—since 1957 home to the European Union—such change is taking place. Observing the change, Alexis G. Papadopoulos explores a new geographical concept, the Central Executive District. This urban form is significantly different from the Central Business District, its conventional counterpart. Drawing on game and rational choice theories, spatial analysis, and land economics, the author analyzes how the landscape of the city's center has evolved over the last three decades under the influence of successive coalitions of local and foreign elites. He describes how foreign diplomats, international corporate executives, and real-estate developers cooperate with one another to carry out major urban projects in the face of resistance from local neighborhood groups, conservationists, and political factions.

This study makes a substantial contribution to geography and urban studies both for its implications about the future of world cities like New York, London, and Paris and for its original application of the notion of cooperative regimes.

Urban Underworlds is an exploration of city spaces, pathologized identities, lurid fears, and American literature. Surveying the 1890s to the 1990s, Thomas Heise chronicles how and why marginalized populations immigrant Americans in the Lower East Side, gays and lesbians in Greenwich Village and downtown Los Angeles, the black underclass in Harlem and Chicago, and the new urban poor dispersed across American cities have been selectively targeted as "urban underworlds" and their neighborhoods characterized as miasmas of disease and moral ruin.

The quarantining of minority cultures helped to promote white, middle-class privilege. Following a diverse array of literary figures who differ with the assessment of the underworld as the space of the monstrous Other, Heise contends that it is a place where besieged and neglected communities are actively trying to take possession of their own neighborhoods.

California has always been America's promised land—for American Indians as much as anyone. In the 1950s, Native people from all over the United States moved to the San Francisco Bay Area as part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Relocation Program. Oakland was a major destination of this program, and once there, Indian people arriving from rural and reservation areas had to adjust to urban living. They did it by creating a cooperative, multi-tribal community—not a geographic community, but rather a network of people linked by shared experiences and understandings. The Intertribal Friendship House in Oakland became a sanctuary during times of upheaval in people's lives and the heart of a vibrant American Indian community. As one long-time resident observes, "The Wednesday Night Dinner at the Friendship House was a must if you wanted to know what was happening among Native people." One of the oldest urban Indian organizations in the country, it continues to serve as a gathering place for newcomers as well as for the descendants of families who arrived half a century ago. This album of essays, photographs, stories, and art chronicles some of the people and events that have played—and continue to play—a role in the lives of Native families in the Bay Area Indian community over the past seventy years. Based on years of work by more than ninety individuals who have participated in the Bay Area Indian community and assembled by the Community History Project at the Intertribal Friendship House, it traces the community's changes from before and during the relocation period through the building of community institutions. It then offers insight into American Indian activism of the 1960s and '70s—including the occupation of Alcatraz—and shows how the Indian community continues to be created and re-created for future generations. Together, these perspectives weave a richly textured portrait that offers an extraordinary inside view of American Indian urban life. Through oral histories, written pieces prepared especially for this book, graphic images, and even news clippings, Urban Voices collects a bundle of memories that hold deep and rich meaning for those who are a part of the Bay Area Indian community—accounts that will be familiar to Indian people living in cities throughout the United States. And through this collection, non-Indians can gain a better understanding of Indian people in America today. "If anything this book is expressive of, it is the insistence that Native people will be who they are as Indians living in urban communities, Natives thriving as cultural people strong in Indian ethnicity, and Natives helping each other socially, spiritually, economically, and politically no matter what. I lived in the Bay Area in 1975-79 and 1986-87, and I was always struck by the Native (many people do say 'American Indian' emphatically!) community and its cultural identity that has always insisted on being second to none. Yes, indeed this book is a dynamic, living document and tribute to the Oakland Indian community as well as to the Bay Area Indian community as a whole." —Simon J. Ortiz "When my family arrived in San Francisco in 1957, the people at the original San Francisco Indian Center helped us adjust to urban living. Many years later, I moved to Oakland and the Intertribal Friendship House became my sanctuary during a tumultuous time in my life. The Intertribal Friendship House was more than an organization. It was the heart of a vibrant tribal community. When we returned to our Oklahoma homelands twenty years later, we took incredible memories of the many people in the Bay Area who helped shape our values and beliefs, some of whom are included in this book." —Wilma Mankiller, former Principal Chief, Cherokee Nation

A baseline study of the growth of preindustrial cities worldwide.

This work employs a subset of preindustrial cities on many continents to answer questions archaeologists grapple with concerning the populating and growth of cities before industrialization. It further explores how scholars differently conceive and execute their research on the population of cities. The subject cities are in Greece, Mesoamerica, the Andes, Italy, Egypt, Africa, United States, Denmark, and China. This broad sample provides a useful framework for answers to such questions as “Why did people agglomerate into cities?” and “What population size and what age of endurance constitute a city?”

The study covers more than population magnitude and population makeup, the two major frameworks of urban demography. The contributors combine their archaeological and historical expertise to reveal commonalities, as well as theoretical extrapolations and methodological approaches, at work here and outside the sample.

Urbanism in the Preindustrial World is a unique study revealing the variety of factors involved in the coalescing and dispersal of populations in preindustrial times.

 

During the Renaissance, the Italian city of Urbino rivaled Florence and Siena as a center of art, culture, and commerce. Chances are you've never heard of it—but you should have. Raphael was born there. Piero della Francesca painted his famous The Flagellation there. And the city's exquisite Ducal Palace, its twin towers piercing the sky, remains a striking monument to grace and power. Yet despite all its past glory and present charm, Urbino is practically unknown to tourists today.

With Urbino: The Story of a Renaissance City, art historian June Osborne brings to life not only the great city and its art but also its turbulent history and the intrigue surrounding its ruling family. First settled by the ancient Umbrians, Urbino reached its zenith during the fifteenth century under the rule of Duke Federico da Montefeltro and his son Guidobaldo. Federico may have been a usurper and a fierce, opportunistic warlord, but his lust for power was more than matched by his passion for great art. Indeed it was under his direct guidance that the magnificent Ducal Palace was built—its perfectly proportioned courtyard a wonder of early Renaissance architecture.

Today the Ducal Palace hosts the National Gallery of the Marches, one of the most important art galleries in Italy, featuring works by no lesser lights than Raphael, Uccello, Piero della Francesca, and Titian. Exploring such sites as the fourteenth-century Oratorio di San Giovanni Battista and the Gothic Church of San Domenico, Osborne captures not only the startling beauty of Urbino and the Apennine foothills but also the tumultuous legacy of Frederico and his son (and their many wives and courtiers).

With over a hundred lavish color photographs, many by renowned landscape photographer Joe Cornish, Urbino is the best—and the only—guide to this gem of the Italian Marches.

Nineteenth-century England witnessed an unprecedented increase in the number of publications and institutions devoted to the creation and the dissemination of knowledge: encyclopedias, scientific periodicals, instruction manuals, scientific societies, children’s literature, mechanics’ institutes, museums of natural history, and lending libraries. In Useful Knowledge Alan Rauch presents a social, cultural, and literary history of this new knowledge industry and traces its relationships within nineteenth-century literature, ending with its eventual confrontation with Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.
Rauch discusses both the influence and the ideology of knowledge in terms of how it affected nineteenth-century anxieties about moral responsibility and religious beliefs. Drawing on a wide array of literary, scientific, and popular works of the period, the book focusses on the growing importance of scientific knowledge and its impact on Victorian culture. From discussions of Jane Webb Loudon’s The Mummy! and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor, Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke, and George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, Rauch paints a fascinating picture of nineteenth-century culture and addresses issues related to the proliferation of knowledge and the moral issues of this time period. Useful Knowledge touches on social and cultural anxieties that offer both historical and contemporary insights on our ongoing preoccupation with knowledge.
Useful Knowledge will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth century history, literature, culture, the mediation of knowledge, and the history of science.

Trevor S. Luke tackles some of the major issues of the history of the Late Republic and the transition to the empire in a novel way. Taking the perspective that Roman elites, even at this late date, took their own religion seriously as a way to communicate meaning to their fellow Romans, the volume reinterprets some of the most famous events of that period in order to highlight what Sulla, Caesar, and figures of similar stature did to make a religious argument or defense for their actions. This exploration will be of interest to scholars of religion, political science, sociology, classics, and ancient history and to the general history enthusiast. While many people are aware of the important battles and major thinkers of this period of Roman history, the story of its theological discourse and competition is unfolded here for the first time.

History belongs to the people, Dean May reminds us, and must ultimately be accessible all. Based on his award-winning television series, Utah: A People's History provides a sweeping view of the state's past. From prehistory to present, May explains Utah as it is today and its promise for the future. The video series upon which this book is based is no longer available for sale.

Poverty Flat. Bearskin Gulch. Drunken Hollow. Soberville. Hogup Mountain. Lousy Jim Creek. Hey Hoe Canyon. Snake John Reef. Sob Rapids. Nipple Butte. Tooele. Laverskin. Skutumpah. All Utah toponyms, or place names. Where are they? What is their history? Their importance? Are they, or where they populated? Do they exist today? And always, The name. how did they get it? Who provided it? When? What does it mean? Is Centerville in the center, and of what? Was Notom named for a rejected suitor?

John W. Van Cott has spend the better part of a lifetime searching out the answers to these questions. Now the fruits of his labor are recorded in this, the most extensive compilation of Utah place names ever published. Almost five thousand toponyms are listed alphabetically, marking the passage of peoples and cultures from earliest times. Specialists will appreciate the geographical precision of Section, Township, Range, and altitude. Generalists will recognize counties and relationships to know features. All will delight in the rich lore, often a mixture of myth and history, of the place and its name. Scholars will find useful the inclusion of synonyms, nicknames, previous names, all cross-referenced, and all tied to a bibliography of over five hundred entries.

The author concluded his work of over forty years with the observation that he hardly touched the surface of Utah’s place names, numbered at over twenty-two thousand by the U.S. Geological Survey.

From the tempestuous fight for statehood to the evolution of Utah voters from Democrats to Republicans, Rod Decker analyzes the intersection of politics and faith in the complex political culture of modern Utah. Beginning with the state’s roots as a communal theocracy, Utah Politics deftly examines how Mormon morality influenced and continues to shape conflicts on both the local and federal levels. Whether determining the role nuclear fallout played in causing cancer epidemics throughout the state or the influence of Mormon lobbyists, Decker demonstrates how the rose that blossomed in the desert was sometimes fertilized by conspiracy, debate, and political machination.

Some themes reoccur: governors become popular by fighting federal oversight— signaling a lingering distrust that Washington could alter the Mormon way of life—and liberals use the court system to circumvent conservative legislatures who see public morality as a defining feature of government. Through this lens, issues both deceptively innocuous and deeply complex underscore Utah’s dance with religious freedom and civil liberty.

Copublished with the Utah State Historical Society. Affiliated with the Utah Division of State History, Utah Department of Heritage & Arts.

In time for the centennial of the United States’s entry into World War I, this collection of seventeen essays explores the war experience in Utah through multiple perspectives, from those of soldiers, nurses and ambulance drivers who experienced the horror of the conflict firsthand to those on the home front who were transformed by the war. Citizens supported the war financially, through service on councils of defense, with victory gardens, and by other means. Some of Utah’s Native Americans and at least one Episcopal bishop resisted the war. The terrible 1918–1919 flu pandemic impacted Utah and killed more victims around the world than those who died on the battlefields. There was a Red Scare and fight over United States participation in a League of Nations. These topics and more are explored, helping us understand the nature and complexity of the conflict and its impact on Utahns. 

The twentieth century could easily be Utah's most interesting and complex. Utah in the Twentieth Century chronicles the social and cultural transitions of the time, offering a well-rounded perspective on the development and change the Beehive State went through during this period.

It was an era complicated by the push of economic development and pull of traditional culture, demand for natural resources from a fragile and scenic environment, questions of who governs and how, who gets a vote, and who controls what on contested public lands, during which outside trade and a tourist economy increasingly challenged and fed an insular society. Activists left and right declaimed constitutional liberties while Utah's Native Americans become the last enfranchised in the nation. Proud contributions to national wars contrasted with denial of deep dependence on federal money; the skepticism of provocative writers, boosters eager for growth; and reflexive patriotism somehow bonded to ingrained distrust of federal government.

A valuable resource for students and teachers, this work is also fruitful reading for anyone who desires to know more about key themes of Utah’s history in the twentieth century.

"On Sunday 9 April 1865, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee met in the parlor of Wilmer McLean’s brick home in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, to negotiate the conclusion of the Civil War. That same day, far to the west, a handful of Mormons and northern Utes met in the central Utah town of Manti in an attempt to achieve a peace of their own. Unlike the negotiations at Appomattox, however, those in Manti failed, and the events that transpired there are viewed as the beginning of Utah’s Black Hawk War, the longest and most serious Indian-white conflict in Utah history."
—From the book

So begins the story of Black Hawk, Ute Indian warrior chief and brilliant strategist, and Brigham Young, sagacious religious and political leader of the Mormons. Two powerful and unyielding men forged by hardship and conviction, both revered and both reviled in their times. One, orchestrating a remarkable campaign to turn back the tide of white expansion and prevent the extinction of his people, the other, attempting to keep his exiled church and its thriving utopian society sovereign and intact. Two men of distinct races, beliefs, and cultures, but sharing a determination to keep U.S. soldiers out of their bloody conflict for control of land and other resources in the Utah territory.

From 1865 to 1867, the warrior Black Hawk, also known as Antonga, led a combined force of Utes, Navajos, and Paiutes in a series of intense stock raids on the Mormon settlements in Utah territory. Black Hawk astutely judged that political conflict between the federal government and Mormon Utah would keep U.S. soldiers from chastising his band. Moreover, the antagonism of Washington toward Utah’s polygamy, theocracy, and isolationism made Mormon leader Brigham Young wary of seeking federal help. In fact, to keep the government from using the war as a pretext for sending more troops to Utah, the Mormons withheld information, making the Black Hawk War an almost secret war as far as the rest of the nation was concerned. As directed by Brigham Young, Utah’s Latter-day Saint citizens mobilized a church militia, the Nauvoo Legion, to repel Indian attacks. Yet Black Hawk and others were able to carry on their activities for almost eight years without incurring the federal military reprisals that Indians on all four sides of the Mormon heartland experienced. Bloodshed on both sides plunged Mormons and Indians into a war of vengeance—years of killing and raiding that continued until federal troops stepped in 1872.

In this unprecedented volume, historian John Peterson provides the first comprehensive analysis of a unique and compelling chapter of western history and of the violent and protracted conflict it engendered. Utah’s Black Hawk War not only explores political intricacies and broader implications, scrutinizing the Mormons' Indian policies—most notably Brigham Young’s extraordinary "better to feed them than fight them" teachings—but also presents vivid narrative accounts of various raids and battles. The result is a masterfully researched and engagingly written account of Utah’s secret war, a war largely unknown among western history students, scholars, and enthusiasts—until now.

Winner of the Mormon History Association Francis M. and Emily S. Chipman Best First Book Award. 

 It was Sunday and worship service was in progress. One of the settlers who was not attending service eyed four known outlaws passing near town. He raced to church to spread the alarm, and parishioners leaped up, grabbed their guns, and galloped off in pursuit, joined by some neighboring cattlemen. Before it was over, one of the posse was dead.

So it went on the outskirts of Utah Territory. In this case it was the little town of Bluff where the Mormon bishop served for some ten years as de facto sheriff and his congregation as deputies. As elsewhere, law and order developed organically rather than by legislation.

In this anthology several aspects of the process are considered, including one of the worst manifestations of citizen action: vigilantism. Territorial Utah witnessed more lynchings than legal executions. Another citizen trait was an unexpected indifference to vice. In 1908 Salt Lake City had 148 registered prostitutes overseen by a madam who was recruited for the position by the mayor and city council. During Prohibition one of the largest distilleries in the West operated in a Salt Lake warehouse.

What is to be learned from this? The contributors to these fourteen articles leave moral considerations to the reader’s contemplation, while providing surprises along the way in an extremely engaging—dare we say arresting—read.

One of the most important Postclassic cities, Utatlán, in highland Guatemala, was excavated more than three decades ago. However, the data amassed by archaeologists have not been published until now. Details on architecture, pottery, burials, and artifacts, along with a focus on residential archaeology, make Utatlán: The Constituted Community of the K'iche' Maya of Q'umarkaj a significant contribution to Maya archaeology.

Most information available on Utatlán focuses on the ceremonial center and ignores the city of the commoners. Using the archaeological data, Utatlán attempts to determine the boundaries of the community and to characterize subdivisions within it. Evidence of indigenous nonelite houses, rich burials, and grave goods unlike those found in contemporary sites reveals information about the supporting residence zone. In addition, Babcock applies the concept of "constituted community," interpreting the archaeological data from a prehistoric context, and proposes a theoretical framework for interpreting prehistoric sites with respect to urbanism and political complexity.

Utatlán: The Constituted Community of the K'iche' Maya of Q'umarkaj will be of interest to students and scholars of Mesoamerican anthropology, archaeology, and ethnohistory.

Using government documents, archives, and local histories, Simmons has painstakingly separated the often repeated and often incorrect hearsay from more accurate accounts of the Ute Indians.

Utopia Limited is an original, engaging account of how postmodernism emerged from the political and cultural upheaval of the 1960s. Marianne DeKoven argues that aspects of sixties radical politics and culture simultaneously embodied the full, final flowering of the modern and the beginning of the postmodern. Analyzing classic sixties texts, DeKoven shows where the utopian master narratives underlying the radical and countercultural movements gave way to the “utopia limited” of the postmodern as a range of competing political values and desires came to the fore. She identifies the pivots where the modern was superseded by the nascent postmodern: where modern mass culture was replaced by postmodern popular culture, modern egalitarianism morphed into postmodern populism, and modern individualism fragmented into postmodern politics and cultures of subjectivity.

DeKoven rigorously analyzes a broad array of cultural and political texts important in the sixties—from popular favorites such as William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch to political manifestoes including The Port Huron Statement, the founding document of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). She examines texts that overtly discuss the conflict in Vietnam, Black Power, and second-wave feminism—including Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex; experimental pieces such as The Living Theatre’s Paradise Now; influential philosophical works including Roland Barthes’s Mythologies and Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man; and explorations of Las Vegas, the prime location of postmodernity. Providing extensive annotated bibliographies on both the sixties and postmodernism, Utopia Limited is an invaluable resource for understanding the impact of that tumultuous decade on the present.

The royal Parisian botanical garden, the Jardin du Roi, was a jewel in the crown of the French Old Regime, praised by both rulers and scientific practitioners. Yet unlike many such institutions, the Jardin not only survived the French Revolution but by 1800 had become the world's leading public establishment of natural history: the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle.

E. C. Spary traces the scientific, administrative, and political strategies that enabled the foundation of the Muséum, arguing that agriculture and animal breeding rank alongside classification and collections in explaining why natural history was important for French rulers. But the Muséum's success was also a consequence of its employees' Revolutionary rhetoric: by displaying the natural order, they suggested, the institution could assist in fashioning a self-educating, self-policing Republican people. Natural history was presented as an indispensable source of national prosperity and individual virtue.

Spary's fascinating account opens a new chapter in the history of France, science, and the Enlightenment.

Winner of the 2008 Honor Book by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities

Utopia. New Jersey. For most people—even the most satisfied New Jersey residents—these words hardly belong in the same sentence. Yet, unbeknown to many, history shows that the state has been a favorite location for utopian experiments for more than a century. Thanks to its location between New York and Philadelphia and its affordable land, it became an ideal proving ground where philosophical and philanthropical organizations and individuals could test their utopian theories.

In this intriguing look at this little-known side of New Jersey, Perdita Buchan explores eight of these communities. Adopting a wide definition of the term utopia—broadening it to include experimental living arrangements with a variety of missions—Buchan explains that what the founders of each of these colonies had in common was the goal of improving life, at least as they saw it.

In every other way, the communities varied greatly, ranging from a cooperative colony in Englewood founded by Upton Sinclair, to an anarchist village in Piscataway centered on an educational experiment, to the fascinating Physical Culture City in Spotswood, where drugs, tobacco, and corsets were banned, but where nudity was widespread.

Despite their grand intentions, all but one of the utopias—a single-tax colony in Berkeley Heights—failed to survive. But Buchan shows how each of them left a legacy of much more than the buildings or street names that remain today—legacies that are inspiring, surprising, and often outright quirky.

Architectural postmodernism had a significant impact on the broader development of postmodern thought: Utopia’s Ghost is a critical reconsideration of their relationship. Combining discourse analysis, historical reconstruction, and close readings of buildings, projects, and texts from the 1970s and 1980s, Reinhold Martin argues that retheorizing postmodern architecture gives us new insights into cultural postmodernism and its aftermath.

 

Much of today’s discussion has turned to the recovery of modernity, but Martin writes in the Introduction, “Simply to historicize postmodernism seems inadequate and, in many ways, premature.” Utopia’s Ghost connects architecture to current debates on biopolitics, neoliberalism, and corporate globalization as they are haunted by the problem of utopia. Exploring a series of concepts—territory, history, language, image, materiality, subjectivity, and architecture itself—Martin shows how they reorganize the cultural imaginary and shape a contemporary biopolitics that ultimately precludes utopian thought.

 

Written at the intersection of culture, politics, and the city, particularly in the context of corporate globalization, Utopia’s Ghost challenges dominant theoretical paradigms and opens new avenues for architectural scholarship and cultural analysis.

Historians know a great deal about how English thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the "documentable" past, but relatively little about how they perceived times stretching back beyond history. Arthur B. Ferguson shows in this elegant essay that prehistory had great meaning in Renaissance England. Commentators of various sorts—from poets to antiquaries—looked to the most distant past for the vanishing point that would perfect their historical perspective and orient them in an age of increasing change. In this pursuit they had often to let imagination serve the purposes of interpretation. Though largely speculative, their efforts reveal much about the intellectual life of Renaissance England.
Since the Bible left little room for speculation on prehistory—in fact no room at all for the concept itself—Utter Antiquity concentrates on myth and legend outside of the biblical context and on those who conjured prehistory out of these sources. A subtle conflict between belief and skepticism emerges from these pages, as Ferguson reveals how some Renaissance writers struggled with ancient explanations that flouted reason and experience, while others sidestepped such doubts by relating prehistory to man's social evolution. By isolating and analyzing topics such as skepticism, rationalism, and poetic history, Ferguson illuminates the development of historical consciousness in early modern England. His accessible and eloquent study contributes significantly to an understanding of the Renaissance mind and intellectual history in general.