Susan Wiley Hardwick

Donald G. Holtgrieve

Valley for Dreams is a fascinating historical geography of "forgotten California"--that portion of the Great Central Valley north of Sacramento. Structured around four key themes--the environment, people, economy, and landscape-- the book analyzes how this region's lush natural environment changed as successive groups and individuals made it one of the fastest growing and ethnically diverse rural areas in North America. The book's numerous maps, graphs, tables, sketches, and photographs bring the area's geography to life. Valley for Dreams is an important work for geographers, historians, and local residents interested in their town geographies.

Life and Landscape in the Sacramento Valley

Valley for Dreams

Caroline Brettell

Audrey Singer

"Focuses on the fastest-growing immigrant populations among "second-tier" metropolitan areas. Examines the changes wrought by these new suburban settlement patterns and provides comparative analysis of immigration trends and local policy responses in these gateways. Case examples explore the challenges of newcomer integration, as well as immigration's impact on suburban infrastructure"--Provided by publisher.

Immigrant Incorporation in Suburban America

Twenty-first-century Gateways

Despite its appeal as a natural harbor, Galveston, Texas, is located on a small Gulf Coast barrier island that makes it ill-suited for dense urban development. Early American and European settlers envisioned Galveston harbor as a place with tremendous economic potential, appropriate for urban expansion. In Mythic Galveston: Reinventing America's Third Coast, Susan Wiley Hardwick examines Galveston's rapid rise and the myth created by immigrants and boosters to promote the vision of an abundant island with a highly temperate, even tropical, climate, ideal for settlement. Hardwick's historical analysis focuses on immigrant settlement patterns and the important contributions to Galveston's evolving sense of place made by diverse ethnic and racial groups. As the Ellis Island of the Third Coast, Galveston served as a major gateway for immigrants heading for the Great Plains, the West, and other parts of North America during the latter part of the nineteenth century and into the early part of the twentieth century. Galveston's reputation as an ethnically diverse and cosmopolitan city fostered a myth of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic harmony. Although such harmony was largely illusory, Hardwick argues that Galveston was a truly global city from the earliest days of settlement, giving it a social ambience distinct from that of the mainland. Mythic Galveston vividly illustrates how a place especially vulnerable to the forces of nature has grown into a culturally vibrant city within America's Third Coast.

Reinventing America's Third Coast

Mythic Galveston

In 1987, when victims of religious persecution were finally allowed to leave Russia, a flood of immigrants landed on the Pacific shores of North America. By the end of 1992 over 200,000 Jews and Christians had left their homeland to resettle in a land where they had only recently been considered "the enemy." Russian Refuge is a comprehensive account of the Russian immigrant experience in California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and British Columbia since the first settlements over two hundred years ago. Susan Hardwick focuses on six little-studied Christian groups—Baptists, Pentecostals, Molokans, Doukhobors, Old Believers, and Orthodox believers—to study the role of religion in their decisions to emigrate and in their adjustment to American culture. Hardwick deftly combines ethnography and cultural geography, presenting narratives and other data collected in over 260 personal interviews with recent immigrants and their family members still in Russia. The result is an illuminating blend of geographic analysis with vivid portrayals of the individual experience of persecution, migration, and adjustment. Russian Refuge will interest cultural geographers, historians, demographers, immigration specialists, and anyone concerned with this virtually untold chapter in the story of North American ethnic diversity.

Susan Wiley Hardwick

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