Racial Beachhead

In 1917, Fort Ord was established in the tiny subdivision of Seaside, California. Over the course of the 20th century, it held great national and military importance—a major launching point for World War II operations, the first base in the military to undergo complete integration, the West Coast's most important training base for draftees in the Vietnam War, a site of important civil rights movements—until its closure in the 1990s. Alongside it, the city of Seaside took form. Racial Beachhead offers the story of this city, shaped over the decades by military policies of racial integration in the context of the ideals of the American civil rights movement. Middle class blacks, together with other military families—black, white, Hispanic, and Asian—created a local politics of inclusion that continues to serve as a reminder that integration can work to change ideas about race. Though Seaside's relationship with the military makes it unique, at the same time the story of Seaside is part and parcel of the story of 20th century American town life. Its story contributes to the growing history of cities of color—those minority-majority places that are increasingly the face of urban America.

An ambitious history of a California city that epitomizes the history of race relations in modern America. Although much has been written about the urban–rural divide in America, the city of Salinas, California, like so many other places in the state and nation whose economies are based on agriculture, is at once rural and urban. For generations, Salinas has been associated with migrant farmworkers from different racial and ethnic groups. This broad-ranging history of "the Salad Bowl of the World" tells a complex story of community-building in a multiracial, multiethnic city where diversity has been both a cornerstone of civic identity and, from the perspective of primarily white landowners and pragmatic agricultural industrialists, essential for maintaining the local workforce. Carol Lynn McKibben draws on extensive original research, including oral histories and never-before-seen archives of local business groups, tracing Salinas's ever-changing demographics and the challenges and triumphs of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Mexican immigrants, as well as Depression-era Dust Bowl migrants and white ethnic Europeans. McKibben takes us from Salinas's nineteenth-century beginnings as the economic engine of California's Central Coast up through the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on communities of color today, especially farmworkers who already live on the margins. Throughout the century-plus of Salinas history that McKibben explores, she shows how the political and economic stability of Salinas rested on the ability of nonwhite minorities to achieve a measure of middle-class success and inclusion in the cultural life of the city, without overturning a system based in white supremacy. This timely book deepens our understanding of race relations, economic development, and the impact of changing demographics on regional politics in urban California and in the United States as a whole.

Between 1940 and 2010, the black population of the American West grew from 710,400 to 7 million. With that explosive growth has come a burgeoning interest in the history of the African American West—an interest reflected in the remarkable range and depth of the works collected in Freedom’s Racial Frontier. Editors Herbert G. Ruffin II and Dwayne A. Mack have gathered established and emerging scholars in the field to create an anthology that links past, current, and future generations of African American West scholarship. The volume’s sixteen chapters address the African American experience within the framework of the West as a multicultural frontier. The result is a fresh perspective on western-U.S. history, centered on the significance of African American life, culture, and social justice in almost every trans-Mississippi state. Examining and interpreting the twentieth century while mindful of events and developments since 2000, the contributors focus on community formation, cultural diversity, civil rights and black empowerment, and artistic creativity and identity. Reflecting the dynamic evolution of new approaches and new sites of knowledge in the field of western history, the authors consider its interconnections with fields such as cultural studies, literature, and sociology. Some essays deal with familiar places, while others look at understudied sites such as Albuquerque, Oahu, and Las Vegas, Nevada. By examining black suburbanization, the Information Age, and gentrification in the urban West, several authors conceive of a Third Great Migration of African Americans to and within the West. The West revealed in Freedom’s Racial Frontier is a place where black Americans have fought—and continue to fight—to make their idea of freedom live up to their expectations of equality; a place where freedom is still a frontier for most persons of African heritage.

This is the first academic monograph to focus exclusively on issues of race, ethnicity, whiteness and multiculture at the English seaside. The book calls for acknowledgement of the racialised nature of this environment, and proposes that its distinctive spaces, places, traditions and narratives should be included within broader analyses of race in contemporary Britain. Introducing the concept of ‘coastal liquidity’ to explain shifting ethno-racial demographics, migratory politics and spatial dynamics at the edge of the sea, along with the relative im/mobilities of the minority ethnic communities who move and reside there, the author provides a relational exploration of seaside experiences: both as a locus of racialised categorisation, exclusion and subjugation, and one of resistance, conviviality and intercultural exchange. Combining theoretical insight and empirical fieldwork, the book disrupts dominant thinking that fixes ontologically minority ethnic bodies to urban spaces, and overcomes their erasure and silencing from the seaside landscapes of the popular imagination.

"The book demonstrates how African American soldiers used military service as a tool to challenge white notions of second-class citizenry"--

Political and Military Sociology, Volume 41 explores the social elements and impact of national defense. The origin of government is a response to a society's common interest in security and defense. In recent years, security and defense issues, and government responses, have become increasingly prominent in societies around the world. Despite intermittent pushes for privatization, however, security and defense have remained core functions of government. In this volume Bruce D. McDonald III investigates the historiography of the defense-growth relationship. Lachezar G. Anguelov and Robert J. Eger III consider the social impact with a case study of the Republic of Serbia. Maximiliano Mendieta and Bruce D. McDonald III consider the social spillovers of the sector that arise after the completion of a soldier's service. Paul Kellogg considers why some countries have fared well when others have been slow to rebound. Hamid E. Ali studies pork barrel spending in the United States. Susan Sample, Brandon Valeriano, and Choong-Nam Kang broaden the understanding of the defense sector to include its output. Hamid E. Ali and Ubah A. Adan conclude the volume with a study on conflict and infant and child mortality rates. Traditionally, national defense is viewed solely in military terms. As part of their national security objectives, many defense sectors have undertaken a variety of social programs. While the existence of social programs is known, what remains uncertain is how they spill over from the sector to society at-large and what is the impact of that spillover.

Throughout its history, the U.S. military has worked in close connection to market-based institutions and structures. It has run systems of free and unfree labor, taken over private sector firms, and both spurred and snuffed out economic development. It has created new markets—for consumer products, for sex work, and for new technologies. It has operated as a regulator of industries and firms and an arbitrator of labor practices. And in recent decades it has gone so far as to refashion itself from the inside, so as to become more similar to a for-profit corporation. The Military and the Market covers two centuries of history of the U.S. military’s vast and varied economic operations, including its often tense relationships with capitalist markets. Collecting new scholarship at the intersection of the fields of military history, business history, policy history, and the history of capitalism, the nine chapters feature important new research on subjects ranging from Civil War soldier-entrepreneurs, to the business of the construction of housing and overseas bases for the Cold War, to the U.S. military’s troubled relationships with markets for sex. The volume enriches scholars’ understandings of the depth and complexity of military-market relations in U.S. history and offers today’s military policymakers novel insights about the origins of current arrangements and how they might be reimagined. Contributors: Jessica L. Adler, Timothy Barker, Patrick Chung, Gretchen Heefner, Jennifer Mittelstadt, A. Junn Murphy, Kara Dixon Vuic, Sarah Jones Weicksel, Mark R. Wilson, Daniel Wirls.

The sixth edition of the highly successful The City Reader juxtaposes the very best classic and contemporary writings on the city to provide the comprehensive mapping of the terrain of Urban Studies and Planning old and new. The City Reader is the anchor volume in the Routledge Urban Reader Series and is now integrated with all ten other titles in the series. This edition has been extensively updated and expanded to reflect the latest thinking in each of the disciplinary areas included and in topical areas such as compact cities, urban history, place making, sustainable urban development, globalization, cities and climate change, the world city network, the impact of technology on cities, resilient cities, cities in Africa and the Middle East, and urban theory. The new edition places greater emphasis on cities in the developing world, globalization and the global city system of the future. The plate sections have been revised and updated. Sixty generous selections are included: forty-four from the fifth edition, and sixteen new selections, including three newly written exclusively for The City Reader. The sixth edition keeps classic writings by authors such as Ebenezer Howard, Ernest W. Burgess, LeCorbusier, Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, and Louis Wirth, as well as the best contemporary writings of, among others, Peter Hall, Manuel Castells, David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, and Kenneth Jackson. In addition to newly commissioned selections by Yasser Elshestawy, Peter Taylor, and Lawrence Vale, new selections in the sixth edition include writings by Aristotle, Peter Calthorpe, Alberto Camarillo, Filip DeBoech, Edward Glaeser, David Owen, Henri Pirenne, The Project for Public Spaces, Jonas Rabinovich and Joseph Lietman, Doug Saunders, and Bish Sanyal. The anthology features general and section introductions as well as individual introductions to the selected articles introducing the authors, providing context, relating the selection to other selection, and providing a bibliography for further study. The sixth edition includes fifty plates in four plate sections, substantially revised from the fifth edition.