From Cowtown to Desert Metropolis

From Cowtown to Desert Metropolis
Author: Roy P. Drachman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 236
Release: 1999
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Native-born Roy P. Drachman gives a personal account of how Tucson, southern Arizona, and the entire state have grown and developed in his lifetime. As a real estate developer, community activist, and philanthropist, the author is able to provide a behind-the-scenes look at some of the changes.

Tucson

Tucson
Author: David Devine
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2015-06-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0786497106

Once considered the "Metropolis of Arizona," Tucson is in many respects a college town with a major military base onto which a retirement community has been grafted. A sprawling city of one million in the Sonoran Desert, Tucson was developed during and especially for the second half of the 20th century, a reality which has left it possibly unprepared for the challenges of the 21st century. Tracing the remarkable history of Tucson since 1854, this book describes many aspects of the community--its ceremonies and customs, its early bitter battle to secure the University of Arizona, its multitude of problems, its noteworthy successes and its racial divides. The recollections of those who have made Tucson such a memorable place are included, from political leaders to celebrities to ordinary residents.

Tucson

Tucson
Author: John Warnock
Publisher: Wheatmark, Inc.
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2019-10-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 162787707X

This account of the drama in time that is Tucson begins not with the founding of the Presidio San Agustín on August 20, 1775, but with the emergence of Sentinel Peak in geologic deep time. It ends -- "To be continued"-- in 2014. It spans the periods of precontact with Europeans, Spanish colonization, Mexican nationhood, the territorial West, early and Depression era statehood, and the development of metropolitan Tucson after World War II. It offers not one definitive historical account but a collection of stories in which threads appear that may disappear beneath the surface for a while and reappear later, like some desert streams. It leaves spaces for, and invites the stories of, its readers. About the Author John Warnock was born in Tucson and graduated from Tucson High when it was one of the largest high schools in the nation. He attended Amherst College in Massachusetts, Oxford University in England, and the New York University School of Law. After teaching at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, he returned to Tucson in 1990 to join the English Department at the University of Arizona. He is now Professor Emeritus at UA and resides in Tucson.

Breathing Space

Breathing Space
Author: Gregg Mitman
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0300138326

Allergy is the sixth leading cause of chronic illness in the United States. More than fifty million Americans suffer from allergies, and they spend an estimated $18 billion coping with them. Yet despite advances in biomedicine and enormous investment in research over the past fifty years, the burden of allergic disease continues to grow. Why have we failed to reverse this trend? Breathing Space offers an intimate portrait of how allergic disease has shaped American culture, landscape, and life. Drawing on environmental, medical, and cultural history and the life stories of people, plants, and insects, Mitman traces how America’s changing environment from the late 1800s to the present day has led to the epidemic growth of allergic disease. We have seen a never-ending stream of solutions to combat allergies, from hay fever resorts, herbicides, and air-conditioned homes to numerous potions and pills. But, as Mitman shows, despite the quest for a magic bullet, none of the attempted solutions has succeeded. Until we address how our changing environment—physical, biological, social, and economic—has helped to create America’s allergic landscape, that hoped-for success will continue to elude us.

La Calle

La Calle
Author: Lydia R. Otero
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2016-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0816534918

On March 1, 1966, the voters of Tucson approved the Pueblo Center Redevelopment Project—Arizona’s first major urban renewal project—which targeted the most densely populated eighty acres in the state. For close to one hundred years, tucsonenses had created their own spatial reality in the historical, predominantly Mexican American heart of the city, an area most called “la calle.” Here, amid small retail and service shops, restaurants, and entertainment venues, they openly lived and celebrated their culture. To make way for the Pueblo Center’s new buildings, city officials proceeded to displace la calle’s residents and to demolish their ethnically diverse neighborhoods, which, contends Lydia Otero, challenged the spatial and cultural assumptions of postwar modernity, suburbia, and urban planning. Otero examines conflicting claims to urban space, place, and history as advanced by two opposing historic preservationist groups: the La Placita Committee and the Tucson Heritage Foundation. She gives voice to those who lived in, experienced, or remembered this contested area, and analyzes the historical narratives promoted by Anglo American elites in the service of tourism and cultural dominance. La Calle explores the forces behind the mass displacement: an unrelenting desire for order, a local economy increasingly dependent on tourism, and the pivotal power of federal housing policies. To understand how urban renewal resulted in the spatial reconfiguration of downtown Tucson, Otero draws on scholarship from a wide range of disciplines: Chicana/o, ethnic, and cultural studies; urban history, sociology, and anthropology; city planning; and cultural and feminist geography.

Space in America

Space in America
Author: Klaus Benesch
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 589
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9042018763

America's sense of space has always been tied to what Hayden White called the narrativization of real events. If the awe-inspiring manifestations of nature in America (Niagara Falls, Virginia's Natural Bridge, the Grand Canyon, etc.) were often used as a foil for projecting utopian visions and idealizations of the nation's exceptional place among the nations of the world, the rapid technological progress and its concomitant appropriation of natural spaces served equally well, as David Nye argues, to promote the dominant cultural idiom of exploration and conquest. From the beginning, American attitudes towards space were thus utterly contradictory if not paradoxical; a paradox that scholars tried to capture in such hybrid concepts as the middle landscape (Leo Marx), an engineered New Earth (Cecelia Tichi), or the technological sublime (David Nye). Not only was America's concept of space paradoxical, it has always also been a contested terrain, a site of continuous social and cultural conflict. Many foundational issues in American history (the dislocation of Native and African Americans, the geo-political implications of nation-building, immigration and transmigration, the increasing division and clustering of contemporary American society, etc.) involve differing ideals and notions of space. Quite literally, space and its various ideological appropriations formed the arena where America's search for identity (national, political, cultural) has been staged. If American democracy, as Frederick Jackson Turner claimed, is born of free land, then its history may well be defined as the history of the fierce struggles to gain and maintain power over both the geographical, social and political spaces of America and its concomitant narratives. The number and range of topics, interests, and critical approaches of the essays gathered here open up exciting new avenues of inquiry into the tangled, contentious relations of space in America. Topics include: Theories of Space - Landscape / Nature - Technoscape / Architecture / Urban Utopia - Literature - Performance / Film / Visual Arts.

GhostWest

GhostWest
Author: Ann Ronald
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2005-02-03
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780806136943

Our sense of place is permeated by ghosts from the past. In GhostWest, Ann Ronald takes the reader to historical sites where something once happened. Using the metaphor of hauntings, she reflects on how western history, literature, and lore continue to shape our visceral impressions of these sites. In chapters both lyrical and thoughtful, passionate and humorous, GhostWest covers sites in seventeen western states, including the Little Bighorn Battlefield in Montana, Willa Cather’s Nebraska prairies, and the Murrah Building bombing site in Oklahoma. Through these settings and their phantoms, the author mulls questions of why we find such ambience and artifacts so compelling. Volume 7 in the Literature of the American West series

Wires That Bind

Wires That Bind
Author: Torsten Kathke
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2017-07-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 3839437903

The arrival of telegraphy and railroads changed power relations throughout the world in the nineteenth century. In the Mesilla region of the American Southwest, it contributed to two distinct and rapid shifts in political and economic power from the 1850s to the 1920s. Torsten Kathke illustrates how the changes these technologies wrought everywhere could be seen at a much accelerated pace here. A local Hispano elite was replaced first by a Hispano-Anglo one, and finally a nationally oriented Anglo elite. As various groups tried to gain, hold, and defend power, the region became bound ever closer to the US economy and to the federal government.