Anglo American Crossroads

There are few places where mobility has shaped identity as widely as the American West, but some locations and populations sit at its major crossroads, maintaining control over place and mobility, labor and race. In Collisions at the Crossroads, Genevieve Carpio argues that mobility, both permission to move freely and prohibitions on movement, helped shape racial formation in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles and the Inland Empire throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By examining policies and forces as different as historical societies, Indian boarding schools, bicycle ordinances, immigration policy, incarceration, traffic checkpoints, and Route 66 heritage, she shows how local authorities constructed a racial hierarchy by allowing some people to move freely while placing limits on the mobility of others. Highlighting the ways people of color have negotiated their place within these systems, Carpio reveals a compelling and perceptive analysis of spatial mobility through physical movement and residence.

A critical and original evaluation of American influences on urban reconstruction and regeneration in post-war Britain.

The postwar British city was been shaped by many international forces during the last century, but American influences on British urban research and urban planning have been particularly significant. Beginning with debates about reconstruction during the Second World War, Anglo-American Crossroads explores how Americanisation influenced key approaches to town planning, from reconstruction after 1945 to the New Urbanism of the 1990s. Clapson pays particular attention to the relationship between urban sociological research and planning issues since the 1950s. He also addresses the ways in which American developers and planners of new communities looked to the British new towns and garden city movement for inspiration. Using a wide range of sources, from American Foundation Archives to town planning materials and urban sociologies, Anglo-American Crossroads shows that although some things went wrong in translation from the USA to Britain, there were also some important successes within a transatlantic dialogue that was more nuanced than a one-dimensional process of American hegemony.

This book examines Allied diplomacy from 1941 to 1946, challenging Americocentric views and highlighting the significance of Europe's diplomatic role. Harbutt argues that the Yalta conference of February 1945 was a pivotal moment that signaled a shift from a pre-existing "Europe/America" framework to the "East/West" conception that led to the Cold War.

The new town of Milton Keynes was designated in 1967 with a bold, flexible social vision to impose "no fixed conception of how people ought to live." Despite this progressive social vision, and its low density, flexible, green urban design, the town has been consistently represented in British media, political rhetoric and popular culture negatively. as a fundamentally sterile, paternalistic, concrete imposition on the landscape, as a "joke", and even as "Los Angeles in Buckinghamshire". How did these meanings develop at such odds from residents' and planners' experiences? Why have these meanings proved so resilient? Milton Keynes in British Culture traces the representations of Milton Keynes in British national media, political rhetoric and popular culture in detail from 1967 to 1992, demonstrating how the town's founding principles came to be understood as symbolic of the worst excesses of a postwar state planning system which was falling from favour. Combining approaches from urban planning history, cultural history and cultural studies, political economy and heritage studies, the book maps the ways in which Milton Keynes' newness formed an existential challenge to ideals of English landscapes as receptacles of tradition and closed, fixed national identities. Far from being a marginal, "foreign" and atypical town, the book demonstrates how the changing political fortunes of state urban planned spaces were a key site of conflict around ideas of how the British state should function, how its landscapes should look, and who they should be for.

Focuses on the modern Mexican-American borderlands, where a boundary line seems to separate two dissimilar cultures and economies.

In the late nineteenth century the borderlands between the United States, the British Empire in Canada, and the Asia-Pacific Rim emerged as a crossroads of the Pacific world. In Pacific Connections, Kornel Chang tells the dramatic stories of the laborers, merchants, smugglers, and activists who crossed these borders into the twentieth century, and the American and British empire-builders who countered them by hardening racial and national lines. But even as settler societies attempted to control the processes of imperial integration, their project fractured under its contradictions. Migrant workers and radical activists pursued a transnational politics through the very networks that made empire possible. Charting the U.S.-Canadian borderlands from above and below, Chang reveals the messiness of imperial formation and the struggles it spawned from multiple locations and through different actors across the Pacific world. Pacific Connections is the winner of the Outstanding Book in History award from the Association for Asian American Studies and is a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Book Prize from the American Studies Association.