by Volker Janssen (Editor), Amy Bix (Contribution by), Louise Nelson Dyble (Contribution by)
The American West--where such landmarks as the Golden Gate Bridge rival wild landscapes in popularity and iconic significance--has been viewed as a frontier of technological innovation. Where Minds and Matters Meet calls attention to the convergence of Western history and the history of technology, showing that the region's politics and culture have shaped seemingly placeless, global technological practices and institutions. Drawing on political and social history as well as art history, the book's essays take the cultural measure of the region's great technological milestones, including San Diego's Panama-California Exposition, the building of the Hetch Hetchy Dam in the Sierras, and traffic planning in Los Angeles.
Contributors: Amy Bix, Louise Nelson Dyble, Patrick McCray, Linda Nash, Peter Neushul, Matthew W. Roth, Bruce Sinclair, L. Chase Smith, Carlene Stephens, Aristotle Tympas, Jason Weems, Peter Westwick, Stephanie Young
Front Jacket
Through a combination of solid scholarship and widely differing historical perspectives, the contributing authors make convincing and often counter-intuitive arguments to explain the motives behind some of the most fascinating large-scale projects undertaken during the last 100 years. While scholarly in tone, this one goes alongside Uglow's The Lunar Men and Johnson's The Ghost Map for just plain good reading.--Ken Phillips, Curator for Aerospace Science, California Science Center, Los Angeles 9780520289116|JF|A masterfully written study, alert to the operation of space and power in the dynamics of race, nation, and identity. The author captures historical moments and debates with elegance, staging insightful interventions in established narratives."--Natalia Molina, author of How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts
"There's nothing more American than the cowboy and more Mexican than the charro. With great imagination and meticulous research, Laura Barraclough shows what the intersection between the two reveals about the shifting grounds of U.S./Mexican ethnic masculinity and nationalism from the 1920s to the present."--Sarah Deutsch, author of Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 "This remarkable book moves from California to Colorado to Texas, and from the 1940s to the present, to reconceptualize ethnic Mexican history, urban and rural geographies, and the ways that we think about class and racial formations, colonial legacies, masculinity and gender expression, debates about animal welfare and immigrant rights, and more."--Stephen J. Pitti, author of The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican AmericansBack Jacket
Through a combination of solid scholarship and widely differing historical perspectives, the contributing authors make convincing and often counter-intuitive arguments to explain the motives behind some of the most fascinating large-scale projects undertaken during the last 100 years. While scholarly in tone, this one goes alongside Uglow's The Lunar Men and Johnson's The Ghost Map for just plain good reading.--Ken Phillips, Curator for Aerospace Science, California Science Center, Los Angeles
Author Biography
Volker Janssen is Associate Professor of History at California State University, Fullerton.