Synopses & Reviews
"Loaded with stunning insights and fascinating revelations about a wooded swath of land just outside the nation's capital,
Covert Capital is a model of interdisciplinary scholarship, unearthing the startling connections between landscape, empire and conspiracy."
and#151;Eric Avila, author ofand#160;Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles
"Brilliantly charting the myriad corridors stretching between Northern Virginia and the far-flung corners of U. S. intervention, Andrew Friedmanand#8217;s Covert Capital introduces readers to some of mid-to-late twentieth-century suburbiaand#8217;s open secrets: autocratic allies ensconced in leafy cul-de-sacs, other nationsand#8217; futures worked out at poolside, cocktail chatter crossing CIA assets with real estate assets.and#160; In problematizing the boundaries between the foreign and the domestic, and the political and the personal, and in its subtle, interdisciplinary readings of spatial practice and architectural form, Covert Capital is essential reading for scholars seeking to interpret the landscapes of American global power."
and#151;Paul A. Kramer,and#160;author of The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines
and#147;In this highly innovative history of the U.S. empire, Andrew Friedman carefully delineates the suburban architecture that shaped even as it camouflaged America's global reach. In tracing the emergence of Northern Virginia as the nation's 'covert capital,' he relocates the foreign in the domestic, showing the local sources of imperial power and the quotidian making of its multi-cultural agents. Ever attentive to the ironies of empire, Friedman deepens our understanding of American power by revealing the material designs of its elaborate disavowals.and#147;
and#151;Vicente L. Rafael, author of The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines
Review
"The book's detailed case studies are compelling reading as the author desconstructs the secret world of the American intelligence community, public and private. Recommended."
Review
"Groundbreaking . . . makes for eye-popping reading."
Review
and#8220;Reveals a hidden history of racial segregation on the United States' first television program centered on the teenage population. . . . Provocative.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Well-researched, tightly-written. . . . Impressively bright, clear, and comprehensive.and#8221;
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and#8220;Excellent. . . . Offers a valuable understanding of the . . . melding of African Americans into the national youth culture.and#8221;
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and#8220;The study illustrates how . . . nostalgic representations of the past . . . can work as impediments to progress in the present.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;The Nicest Kids in Town counters the (false) mythology of American Bandstand with valuable descriptions of and#8216;forgottenand#8217; cultural productions.and#8221;
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"Lively and perceptive. . . .and#160;Delmontand#8217;s book offers a subtle,and#160;refreshingly interdisciplinary reading of Bandstandand#160;as a site of the civil rights struggles in Philadelphia."
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"Friedmanand#8217;s sharp critique of Americaand#8217;s roles in Vietnam and Central America motivates and permeates the entire project. Readers will both learn a great deal about American covert operations in the twentieth century and be forced to think about the geography of the national capital as well as its surrounding suburbs in an entirely new way."
Review
"An original and entertaining narrative showing how Cold War planning and operations permanently changed the suburbs of Washington."
Review
"An innovative study of post-war American foreign policy on the home front."
Synopsis
In the decades after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, busing to achieve school desegregation became one of the nation's most controversial civil rights issues. Why Busing Failed is the first book to examine the pitched battles over busing on a national scale, focusing on cities such as Boston, Chicago, New York, and Pontiac, Michigan. This groundbreaking book shows how school officials, politicians, the courts, and the media gave precedence to the desires of white parents who opposed school desegregation over the civil rights of black students.
This broad and incisive history of busing features a cast of characters that includes national political figures such as then-president Richard Nixon, Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, and antibusing advocate Louise Day Hicks, as well as some lesser-known activists on both sides of the issue--Boston civil rights leaders Ruth Batson and Ellen Jackson, who opposed segregated schools, and Pontiac housewife and antibusing activist Irene McCabe, black conservative Clay Smothers, and Florida governor Claude Kirk, all supporters of school segregation. Why Busing Failed shows how antibusing parents and politicians ultimately succeeded in preventing full public school desegregation.
Synopsis
The capital of the U.S. Empire after World War II was not a city. It was an American suburb. In this innovative and timely history, Andrew Friedman chronicles how the CIA and other national security institutions created a U.S. imperial home front in the suburbs of Northern Virginia. In this covert capital, the suburban landscape provided a cover for the workings of U.S. imperial power, which shaped domestic suburban life. The Pentagon and the CIA built two of the largest office buildings in the country there during and after the war that anchored a new imperial culture and social world.
As the U.S. expanded its power abroad by developing roads, embassies, and villages, its subjects also arrived in the covert capital as real estate agents, homeowners, builders, and landscapers who constructed spaces and living monuments that both nurtured and critiqued postwar U.S. foreign policy. Tracing the relationships among American agents and the migrants from Vietnam, El Salvador, Iran, and elsewhere who settled in the southwestern suburbs of D.C., Friedman tells the story of a place that recasts ideas about U.S. immigration, citizenship, nationalism, global interconnection, and ethical responsibility from the post-WW2 period to the present. Opening a new window onto the intertwined history of the American suburbs and U.S. foreign policy, Covert Capital will also give readers a broad interdisciplinary and often surprising understanding of how U.S. domestic and global histories intersect in many contexts and at many scales.
American Crossroads, 37
Synopsis
Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Fit to Be Citizens? demonstrates how both science and public health shaped the meaning of race in the early twentieth century. Through a careful examination of the experiences of Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, Natalia Molina illustrates the many ways local health officials used complexly constructed concerns about public health to demean, diminish, discipline, and ultimately define racial groups. She shows how the racialization of Mexican Americans was not simply a matter of legal exclusion or labor exploitation, but rather that scientific discourses and public health practices played a key role in assigning negative racial characteristics to the group. The book skillfully moves beyond the binary oppositions that usually structure works in ethnic studies by deploying comparative and relational approaches that reveal the racialization of Mexican Americans as intimately associated with the relative historical and social positions of Asian Americans, African Americans, and whites. Its rich archival grounding provides a valuable history of public health in Los Angeles, living conditions among Mexican immigrants, and the ways in which regional racial categories influence national laws and practices. Molinaand#8217;s compelling study advances our understanding of the complexity of racial politics, attesting that racism is not static and that different groups can occupy different places in the racial order at different times.
Synopsis
"
Fit to Be Citizens is tightly organized, crisply and clearly argued, and beautifully written throughout. Molina paints a vivid portrait of an understudied dimension of southern California social history."and#151;David G. Gutiand#233;rrez, author of
Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity"This riveting study crosses boundaries of both discipline and nationality to marvelous effect."and#151;David Roediger, author of Working Toward Whiteness
Synopsis
Every year, hundreds of gay men and lesbians join ex-gay ministries in an attempt to convert to non-homosexual Christian lives. In this fascinating study of the transnational ex-gay movement, Tanya Erzen focuses on the everyday lives of men and women at New Hope Ministry, a residential ex-gay program, over the course of several years. Straight to Jesus traces the stories of people who have renounced long-term relationships and moved from other countries out of a conviction that the conservative Christian beliefs of their upbringing and their own same-sex desires are irreconcilable. Rather than definitively changing from homosexual to heterosexual, the participants experience a conversion that is both sexual and religious as born-again evangelical Christians. At New Hope, they maintain a personal relationship with Jesus and build new forms of kinship and belonging. By becoming what they call "new creations," these men and women testify to religious transformation rather than changes in sexual desire or behavior. Straight to Jesus exposes how the Christian Right attempts to repudiate gay identity and political rights by using the ex-gay movement as evidence that change is possible.” Instead, Erzen reveals, the realities of the lives she examines actually undermine this anti-gay strategy.
Synopsis
"Erzen is sensitive, savvy, and provocative. Her mastery of historical sources, ethnographic technique, and accessible writing style are evident throughout. She illuminates aspects of conservative Christianity central to the 'culture wars,' deepening our understanding of the movement's internal struggles over sexuality, gender, and family issues. Erzen has written a wonderful book."Diane Winston, author of
Red-Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army"Tanya Erzen's wonderful and timely book provides us with a compelling cultural history of the Christian right in the post-war periodfrom the cold war to family and sexual politicsas well as remarkable ethnographic insight into the dynamics of Exodus International. With compassion, humor, and insight, Erzen takes the reader through the ideological, organizational, and daily practices used in efforts to change people's theological and sexual orientations, from self-help to conversion testimony."Faye Ginsburg, Professor of Anthropology, New York University, author of Contested Lives
Synopsis
American Bandstand, one of the most popular television shows ever, broadcast from Philadelphia in the late fifties, a time when that city had become a battleground for civil rights. Counter to host Dick Clarkand#8217;s claims that he integrated American Bandstand, this book reveals how the first national television program directed at teens discriminated against black youth during its early years and how black teens and civil rights advocates protested this discrimination. Matthew F. Delmont brings together major themes in American historyand#151;civil rights, rock and roll, television, and the emergence of a youth cultureand#151;as he tells how white families around American Bandstandand#8217;s studio mobilized to maintain all-white neighborhoods and how local school officials reinforced segregation long after Brown vs. Board of Education. The Nicest Kids in Town powerfully illustrates how national issues and history have their roots in local situations, and how nostalgic representations of the past, like the musical film Hairspray, based on the American Bandstand era, can work as impediments to progress in the present.
Synopsis
and#147;By challenging Dick Clarkand#8217;s claim that he helped integrate American popular music and culture, Matthew Delmont puts the lie to Clarkand#8217;s air-brushed history of American Bandstandand#8217;s role in racial desegregation.
The Nicest Kids in Town shows how the nexus of sound, place, race, and space operated together to create and reinforce a myth of national memory and belonging. Just as importantly, this compelling cultural history demonstrates the importance of the youth market as a theater of struggle where brave young men and womenand#151;outraged by the discrimination and racism they faced for the simple act of enjoying musicand#151;refused to have their bodies, tastes, or desires policed. Delmont shows how the music moved them, and how in turn they moved the music onto television screens across America.and#8221;and#151;Herman Gray, author of
Cultural Moves.
and#147;The Nicest Kids in Town speaks simultaneously to several significant current lines of inquiry among historians of the United States after World War II. Delmont takes on issues that we thought we already knew completelyand#151;the social and cultural history of the 1950s and and#145;60s, the Civil Rights movement, the birth of televisionand#151;but he brings original material to his story and connects these issues in new ways. Delmontand#8217;s work proves him to be a talented, careful, and thorough scholar, and in a large body of work on these topics, his book stands alone.and#8221;and#151;Jay Mechling, author of On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth.
About the Author
Andrew Friedman is an Assistant Professor of History at Haverford College. He has written for a wide variety of publications, including the New York Times, the Journal of Urban History, the Baffler, and the Village Voice. He was awarded an Honorable Mention for the 2015 Society of Architectural Historians Spiro Kostof Book Award.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Interlopers in the Land of Sunshine: Chinese Disease Carriers, Launderers, and Vegetable Peddlers
2. Caught between Discourses of Disease, Health, and Nation: Public Health Attitudes toward Japanese and Mexican Laborers in Progressive-Era Los Angeles
3. Institutionalizing Public Health in Ethnic Los Angeles in the 1920s
4. and#147;We Can No Longer Ignore the Problem of the Mexicanand#8221;: Depression-Era Public Health Policies in Los Angeles
5. The Fight for and#147;Health, Morality, and Decent Living Standardsand#8221;: Mexican Americans and the Struggle for Public Housing in 1930s Los Angeles
Epilogue: Genealogies of Racial Discourses and Practices
Notes
Bibliography
Index