Desert Visions and the Making of Phoenix, 1860-2009

摘要

Despite the tremendous growth of the past half-century, Phoenix has remained a provincial backwater in American urban history. That being said, the city has been swept up in several historiographical trends in the past twenty years. Philip VanderMeer does an excellent job of consolidating these different strands in Desert Visions and the Making of Phoenix. Early research on Phoenix, such as Morning Glories by Amy Bridges, focuses on municipal political development. Bradford Luckingham, another historian of the city, further expands the historical literature to include politically marginalized groups in his book Minorities in Phoenix. Matthew Whitaker and William Collins also explore the relationship between political development and racial minorities in their respective books Race Work and The Emerging Metropolis. Environmental history has recently risen to the forefront as Patricia Gober has written about the local relationship between conservation and community formation in Metropolitan Phoenix, and Andrew Ross discusses the lack of environmental sustainability in Bird on Fire. VanderMeer effectively consolidates these different conceptualizations of Phoenix in Desert Visions through his claim that "form, location, and culture" are the central issues in the history of the region. He argues that the history of Phoenix begins with the environmental impact of the inhospitable region's political, economic, and social character.