Shaped by the West is a primary-source reader that re-writes the history of the United States through a western lens. America's expansion west was the driving force for issues of democracy, politics, race, freedom, and property. The sources included in this volume reflect the important role of the West in national narratives of American history, from the pre-Columbian era to 1877. William Deverell and Anne F. Hyde provide a nuanced look at the past, balancing social and politics topics, and representing all kinds of westerners-black and white, native and immigrant, male and female, powerful and powerless-from more than 20 states across the West and the shifting frontier.

Nothing so changed nineteenth-century America as did the railroad. Growing up together, the iron horse and the young nation developed a fast friendship. "Railroad Crossing" is the story of what happened to that friendship, particularly in California, and it illuminates the chaos that was industrial America from the middle of the nineteenth century through the first decade of the twentieth.
Americans clamored for the progress and prosperity that railroads would surely bring, and no railroad was more crucial for California than the transcontinental line linking East to West. With Gold Rush prosperity fading, Californians looked to the railroad as the state's new savior. But social upheaval and economic disruption came down the tracks along with growth and opportunity.
Analyzing the changes wrought by the railroad, William Deverell reveals the contradictory roles that technology and industrial capitalism played in the lives of Americans. That contrast was especially apparent in California, where the gigantic corporate "Octopus"--the Southern Pacific Railroad--held near-monopoly status. The state's largest employer and biggest corporation, the S.P. was a key provider of jobs and transportation--and wielder of tremendous political and financial clout.
Deverell's lively study is peopled by a rich and disparate cast: railroad barons, newspaper editors, novelists, union activists, feminists, farmers, and the railroad workers themselves. Together, their lives reflect the many tensions--political, social, and economic--that accompanied the industrial transition of turn-of-the-century America.

Shaped by the West is a primary-source reader that re-writes the history of the United States through a western lens. America's expansion west was the driving force for issues of democracy, politics, race, freedom, and property. The sources included in this volume reflect the important role of the West in national narratives of American history, from 1850 to the late twentieth century. William Deverell and Anne F. Hyde provide a nuanced look at the past, balancing social and politics topics, and representing all kinds of westerners-black and white, native and immigrant, male and female, powerful and powerless-from more than 20 states across the West and the shifting frontier.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Los Angeles rose to significance in the first half of the twentieth century by way of its complex relationship to three rivers: the Los Angeles, the Owens, and the Colorado. The remarkable urban and suburban trajectory of southern California since then cannot be fully understood without reference to the ways in which each of these three river systems came to be connected to the future of the metropolitan region. This history of growth must be understood in full consideration of all three rivers and the challenges and opportunities they presented to those who would come to make Los Angeles a global power. Full of primary sources and original documents, Water and Los Angeles will be of interest to both students of Los Angeles and general readers interested in the origins of the city.

California was perhaps the most important locus for the development of the Progressive reform movement in the decades of the twentieth century. These twelve original essays represent the best of the new scholarship on California Progressivism. Ranging across a spectrum that embraces ethnicity, gender, class, and varying ideological stances, the authors demonstrate that reform in California was a far broader, more complicated phenomenon than we have previously understood.
Since the 1950s, scholars have used California Progressivism as a model case study for explaining early twentieth-century social and political reform nationwide. But such a model--which ignored issues of class, race, and gender--simplified a political movement that was, in fact, quite complex.
In revising the monolithic interpretation of reform and reformers, this volume provides a better understanding of the sweeping reform impulses that had such a profound effect on American political and social institutions during this century. Equally important, the issues examined here offer significant insights into problems that the entire country must tackle as we approach the new century.

Chronicling the rise of Los Angeles through shifting ideas of race and ethnicity, William Deverell offers a unique perspective on how the city grew and changed. Whitewashed Adobe considers six different developments in the history of the city--including the cementing of the Los Angeles River, the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1924, and the evolution of America's largest brickyard in the 1920s. In an absorbing narrative supported by a number of previously unpublished period photographs, Deverell shows how a city that was once part of Mexico itself came of age through appropriating--and even obliterating--the region's connections to Mexican places and people. Deverell portrays Los Angeles during the 1850s as a city seething with racial enmity due to the recent war with Mexico. He explains how, within a generation, the city's business interests, looking for a commercially viable way to establish urban identity, borrowed Mexican cultural traditions and put on a carnival called La Fiesta de Los Angeles. He analyzes the subtle ways in which ethnicity came to bear on efforts to corral the unpredictable Los Angeles River and shows how the resident Mexican population was put to work fashioning the modern metropolis. He discusses how Los Angeles responded to the nation's last major outbreak of bubonic plague and concludes by considering the Mission Play, a famed drama tied to regional assumptions about history, progress, and ethnicity. Taking all of these elements into consideration, Whitewashed Adobe uncovers an urban identity--and the power structure that fostered it--with far-reaching implications for contemporary Los Angeles.

""Eden by Design" is a compelling and fascinating description of a possible Los Angeles that never came to be. Greg Hise and William Deverell have resurrected the Olmsted Brothers' 1930 plan for Los Angeles County, and then, in a wonderful introduction, put the plan in context so that to read it now is to see not only what seemed dangerous and possible in 1930 but also how and why one route to the present was chosen over others. In their hands, the plan acts like a ghost of Los Angeles, reminding us about a vanished past, lost possibilities, and the secrets that our present masks."--Richard White, author of "The Organic Machine"

"The Report is not only a vital document in the history of Los Angeles . . . but a lost classic of a neglected golden age of city planning and landscape architecture. . . . It embodies a truly regional perspective; an ecological perspective; a long-range vision; an integration of design with finance and administration; and a truly grand interpretation of public space. It deserves to be known to every serious student of the American planning tradition."--Robert Fishman, author of "Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia"

"An essential document for understanding the history of the West's largest city. Los Angeles had the opportunity to become an extraordinarily beautiful environment, a Paris in the desert. The editors make clear why, sadly, it did not; but also they hold out hope that portions of this brilliant but neglected plan might still be recovered."--Donald Worster, author of "Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas"

"A welcome addition to the literature of American urban planning history."--Roger Montgomery, Professor of ArchitectureEmeritus, University of California, Berkeley