Review Essay: PARADISE PONDERED Urban California,1850—2000

Kevin Starr , Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 (New York : Oxford University Press, 1973); The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s (New York : Oxford University Press, 1997); and The Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990-2003 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). Mike Davis , City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 1990); and Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 1998). Gray Brechin , Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1999). Donald Worster , Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

William Cronon , Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991). Linda Nash emphasizes the important emphasis in Industrial Cowboys on the connection between business history and environmental history . See "The Nature of the Firm," Reviews in American History 30, no. 2 (2002), 266-72.

Carey McWilliams , Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1939). John Steinbeck , The Grapes of Wrath ( New York: The Viking Press, 1939 ).

William Deverell and Tom Sitton , California Progressivism Revisited (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Carey McWilliams , Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1946).

Greg Hise , Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis ( Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

Becky Nicolaides , My Blue Heaven : Life and Politics in the Working Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

James Gregory , American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Walter Nugent , Into the West: The Story of Its People (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).

Douglas Flamming , Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Douglas Monroy , Rebirth: Making Los Angeles, from the Great Migration to the Great Depression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). David Gutierrez , Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Clark Davis , Company Men: White-Collar Life and Corporate Cultures in Los Angeles ( Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

Michael E. , Engh, S.J. , Frontier Faiths: Church, Temple, and Synagogue in Los Angeles, 1846-1888 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press , 1992).

Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).