Skip to main content

Golden Gate and Colossus

By


Looks like a couple of interesting new books on major US engineering fetes:

The Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam are more than just icons of American engineering. They are Depression-era monuments that transformed not only California's physical landscape, but its social one as well. The bridge linked San Francisco to rural Marin County, hastening the consolidation of the Bay Area into a huge metropolis. The dam brought reliable irrigation to Imperial Valley farms, as well as drinking water and hydroelectric power to Los Angeles and other Southwestern cities, fostering their explosive growth.

Here's more from the LA Times.

Comments

  1. CarolJuly 26, 2010 at 12:08 AM

    Tomorrow you can read a long profile of Kevin Starr at SFGate, the Chronicle's on-line site. Today it's for print subscribers only.

    As for the Hoover dam, while it created the wealth of the Imperial Valley, it meant there would be no water going over the border and down to the Sea of Cortez. Many farms in Mexico failed; their residents became immigrant farmworkers, aka "deportee"s.

    ReplyDelete
  2. avrdsJuly 26, 2010 at 5:15 PM

    Thanks for the heads up on the Kevin Starr profile -- looks like it won't be available until Tuesday online.

    I have both of these books on order after reading the review.

    Carol, I've recommended Worster here before, probably before you arrived. Rivers of Empire is a scathing near-polemic on water in the West. An amazing book.

    ReplyDelete
  3. avrdsJuly 26, 2010 at 5:17 PM

    And from the L.A. Times, this link:

    http://blog.loa.org/2010/07/strange-death-of-margaret-fuller.html

    ReplyDelete
  4. avrdsJuly 27, 2010 at 6:15 PM

    Nice story about Starr:

    http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/07/25/MNLK1E7EKB.DTL

    Chartres would love this:

    Unlike the other casually dressed patrons at lunch in downtown San Francisco, he wears a coat and bow tie. He orders a Hangtown fry, a famous old California dish of oysters, bacon and eggs that dates from the Gold Rush.

    Sounds like he was at the Tadich 4 or 5's old hangout....

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more