Based on visitor descriptions of antebellum Mobile, Alabama’s physical and social environment, this book captures a place and time that is particular to Gulf Coast history. Mobile’s foundational era is a period in which the city transformed from a struggling colonial outpost into one of the nation’s most significant economic powerhouses, largely owing to the cotton trade and the labor of enslaved people. On the eve of the Civil War, the Mobile ranked as the fourth most populous community in what would soon become the Confederacy, and within the Gulf Coast region, it stood second only to New Orleans in population, wealth, and influence. In addition to ranking as one of the busiest ports in the United States, the city’s remarkable architecture, beautiful natural setting, and abundance of entertainment options combined to make it one of the South’s most distinctive communities. Its cultural diversity only added to its uniqueness. In addition to being home to the largest white population of any community in Alabama, the city also claimed the state’s largest free Black, foreign-born, and Creole communities. Mobile was the slave-trading center of the state until the 1850s as well and remained thoroughly intertwined with the institution of slavery throughout the antebellum period. By 1860 Mobile's population stood at nearly thirty thousand people, making it the twenty-seventh-largest city in the United States overall. Although numerous histories of Mobile have been published, none have focused on the dozens of evocative firsthand accounts published by antebellum-era visitors. These writings allowed literary-minded travelers, who were often consciously looking for things that struck them as singular about a place, to become proxy tour guides for their contemporary readers. In attempting to capture the essence of the city’s reality at a specific moment in time, Mobile’s antebellum visitors have left us a unique record of one of the South’s most historic communities.

From the memories of everyday experience, Living Atlanta vividly recreates life in the city during the three decades from World War I through World War II--a period in which a small, regional capital became a center of industry, education, finance, commerce, and travel. This profusely illustrated volume draws on nearly two hundred interviews with Atlanta residents who recall, in their own words, "the way it was"--from segregated streetcars to college fraternity parties, from moonshine peddling to visiting performances by the Metropolitan Opera, from the growth of neighborhoods to religious revivals. The book is based on a celebrated public radio series that was broadcast in 1979-80 and hailed by Studs Terkel as "an important, exciting project--a truly human portrait of a city of people." Living Atlanta presents a diverse array of voices--domestics and businessmen, teachers and factory workers, doctors and ballplayers. There are memories of the city when it wasn't quite a city: "Back in those young days it was country in Atlanta," musician Rosa Lee Carson reflects. "It sure was. Why, you could even raise a cow out there in your yard." There are eyewitness accounts of such major events as the Great Fire of 1917: "The wind blowing that way, it was awful," recalls fire fighter Hugh McDonald. "There'd be a big board on fire, and the wind would carry that board, and it'd hit another house and start right up on that one. And it just kept spreading." There are glimpses of the workday: "It's a real job firing an engine, a darn hard job," says railroad man J. R. Spratlin. "I was using a scoop and there wasn't no eight hour haul then, there was twelve hours, sometimes sixteen." And there are scenes of the city at play: "Baseball was the popular sport," remembers Arthur Leroy Idlett, who grew up in the Pittsburgh neighborhood. "Everybody had teams. And people--you could put some kids out there playing baseball, and before you knew a thing, you got a crowd out there, watching kids play." Organizing the book around such topics as transportation, health and religion, education, leisure, and politics, the authors provide a narrative commentary that places the diverse remembrances in social and historical context. Resurfacing throughout the book as a central theme are the memories of Jim Crow and the peculiarities of black-white relations. Accounts of Klan rallies, job and housing discrimination, and poll taxes are here, along with stories about the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, early black forays into local politics, and the role of the city's black colleges. Martin Luther King, Sr., historian Clarence Bacote, former police chief Herbert Jenkins, educator Benjamin Mays, and sociologist Arthur Raper are among those whose recollections are gathered here, but the majority of the voices are those of ordinary Atlantans, men and women who in these pages relive day-to-day experiences of a half-century ago.

"Like citrus, oil, movies, radio, and television, aerospace helped create Southern California and embody its values. Blue Sky Metropolis launches an entirely fresh consideration of an iconic industry that answered the immemorial hunger of the human race for flight and the future."--Kevin Starr, University of Southern California "Blue Sky Metropolis presents an intriguing survey of a unique time in Southern California history, when cheap land and benign weather lured massive aerospace enterprises to the region—eventually serving as home to nearly half of the nation’s defense and space fabricators. Before there was a Silicon Valley, high-tech dreamers were on the loose in the Southland, creating inventions as diverse as the Voyager planetary spacecraft and the Stealth bomber. These highly readable essays help us understand how it happened—how Southern California shaped aerospace, and vice versa."—Charles Elachi, Director, Jet Propulsion Laboratory "Peter Westwick has assembled a rich collection of essays that tell a wonderful story about the importance of the aerospace industry to Southern California and the importance of Southern California to the aerospace industry. There's technology, sociology, economics, geography, anthropology, and much more woven through the chapters. It's an ambitious project, but it succeeds in being interesting, informative, and entertaining."—Michael Rich, President and CEO, The RAND Corporation

The concept of the metropolitan area, as best exemplified by Los Angeles, has highlighted two contradictory characteristics of the current urban scene: the dispersion of political power among a number of centers, and the presence of issues and problems whose impact transcends the jurisdiction of any one local government. In this book the author have focused their attention of the process by which organized groups have sought to identify public issues and to reach decision on them within one of the most rapidly developing and most complex metropolitan areas of the United States: Los Angeles. Beginning with a discussion of the setting and framework of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the authors attempt to clarify the nature of the legal, political, social, and economic forces tha have shaped the present system. The second part of this work is concerned with the contenders for leadership within the area: the central city, the urban county, and the suburbs. On the basis of the collected information, the authors next pose the hypothesis that democratic ideology and group interests have combined to produce competing power centers from which groups operate while at the same time lacking sufficient resources to dominate decision making. In the final section of a number of possible alternatives that might produce decision on area-wide issues are examined, and suggestions for bringing together the various political groupings are given. Research for this work was carried out under a grant from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.

Northern sympathizer in the Confederate capital, daring spymaster, postwar politician: Elizabeth Van Lew was one of the most remarkable figures in American history, a woman who defied the conventions of the nineteenth-century South. In Southern Lady, Yankee Spy, historian Elizabeth Varon provides a gripping, richly researched account of the woman who led what one historian called "the most productive espionage operation of the Civil War." Under the nose of the Confederate government, Van Lew ran a spy ring that gathered intelligence, hampered the Southern war effort, and helped scores of Union soldiers to escape from Richmond prisons. Varon describes a woman who was very much a product of her time and place, yet continually took controversial stands--from her early efforts to free her family's slaves, to her daring wartime activities and beyond. Varon's powerful biography brings Van Lew to life, showing how she used the stereotypes of the day to confound Confederate authorities (who suspected her, but could not believe a proper Southern lady could be a spy), even as she brought together Union sympathizers at all levels of society, from slaves to slaveholders. After the war, a grateful President Ulysses S. Grant named her postmaster of Richmond--a remarkable break with custom for this politically influential post. But her Unionism, Republican politics, and outspoken support of racial justice earned her a lifetime of scorn in the former Confederate capital. Even today, Elizabeth Van Lew remains a controversial figure in her beloved Richmond, remembered as the "Crazy Bet" of Lost Cause propaganda. Elizabeth Varon's account rescues her from both derision and oblivion, depicting an intelligent, resourceful, highly principled woman who remained, as she saw it, true to her country to the end.

A pioneering account of how South Africa's three leading cities were fashioned, experienced, promoted and perceived.

Contains brief references to Aborigines derived from secondary sources.

The text offers a critical perspective on complex and consequential aspects of growth and change in London, viewed through the lens of multiscalar space and brought to life through exemplary case studies. It demonstrates how capital, culture and governance have combined to reproduce London, within a frame of relational geographies and historical relayering. Emphasis is placed on the sequences of political change, capital intensification, industrial restructuring and cultural infusions which have transformed space in London since the 1980s. Tom Hutton contributes to the rich discourse on London’s experiences of urbanization, by producing a fresh perspective on its development saliency. Millennial Metropolis includes a systematic review and synthesis of research literatures on globalizing cities, with reference to the reproduction of space at the metropolitan, district and neighbourhood scales. Hutton offers a nuanced treatment of geographical scale, observed in the blending of global/transnational processes with the fine-grained imprint of governance processes and social relations. These proccesses are manifested in sites of innovation, spectacle and social conviviality, but also produce experiences of displacement and inequality. The author presents a spatial model of metropolitan development by exploring how growth and change in twenty-first-century London is expressed internally as an enlarged zonal structure extending beyond the traditional territories of central and inner London. Serious threats to London are discussed —from the isolating implications of Brexit, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the dire threat of ecological crises and deteriorating public health associated with climate change. This will be an invaluable text for postgraduate students, established scholars and upper level undergraduates, across diverse disciplines and fields including geography, sociology, governance studies and planning and urban studies.