How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America

by Carl Abbott

Overview

Cities rather than individual pioneers have been the driving force in the settlement and economic development of the western half of North America. Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, western urban centers served as starting points for conquest and settlement. As these frontier cities matured into metropolitan centers, they grew from imitators of eastern culture and outposts of eastern capital into independent sources of economic, cultural, and intellectual change.

From the Gulf of Alaska to the Mississippi River and from the binational metropolis of San Diego-Tijuana to the Prairie Province capitals of Canada, Carl Abbott explores the complex urban history of western Canada and the United States. The evolution of western cities from stations for exploration and military occupation to contemporary entry points for migration and components of a global economy reminds us that it is cities that "won the West." And today, as cultural change increasingly moves from west to east, Abbott argues that the urban West represents a new center from which emerging patterns of behavior and changing customs will help to shape North America in the twenty-first century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826333131
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press
Publication date:	07/16/2010
Series:	Histories of the American Frontier Series
Pages:	357
Sales rank:	529,927
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Carl Abbott is professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University and the coeditor of the Pacific Historical Review. He is the author of numerous books on urban history and the development of cities in the United States.

Table of Contents

List of Figures vi

List of Tables viii

Preface ix

Introduction: All Roads Lead to Fresno 1

Chapter 1 Outposts of Empires 17

Transitions: Building a West of Cities, 1840-1940 31

Chapter 2 Across the Wide Mississippi 39

Chapter 3 The First Pacific Century 55

Chapter 4 Inland Empire Cities 74

Chapter 5 Garden Cities 88

Chapter 6 Smokestack Frontiers 100

Chapter 7 Money in the Air 115

Chapter 8 Cities of Homes 132

Chapter 9 Water, Power, Progress 150

Transitions: The Metropolitan West since 1940 163

Chapter 10 Wars and Rumors of War 169

Chapter 11 Progress and Prejudice 186

Chapter 12 The Politics of Diversity 203

Chapter 13 Reshaping the Metropolis 219

Chapter 14 Transnational Urbanism 237

Chapter 15 The Long Arm of the Metropolitan West 256

Conclusion: Urban Frontiers 273

Notes 291

Bibliographical Essay 321

Index 335