156: Gail Cooper's Air-Conditioning America

In Air-Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment, 1900-1960, Gail Cooper examines the development of air-conditioning technology and the tensions between engineering philosophy and consumer preference that shaped its design.  Working from a variety of sources, including trade literature, popular magazines, newspapers, and corporate records, Cooper argues that air-conditioning developed via a process of contestation, and that the three systems that resulted - custom-built systems, centralized air, and window units - are each an imperfect mix of the interests of engineers, corporations, and various consumer groups, legacies of the times when each group was more dominant than the other two.

Per Cooper, air conditioning development went through three major phases.  From 1900 to WWI, engineers Alfred Wolff, Stuart Cramer and Willis Carrier adapted industrial heating, ventilation, and freezing systems to offices and factories.  Their custom designs attempted to control both heat and humidity, though they focused mainly on humidity until the 1930s.  The first custom systems were installed in stock exchanges, banks, and Southern textile mills.  Because Progressive reformers were obsessive about healthy ventilation for schoolchildren, schools also became testing grounds for the new technology.

113: Steve Hoelscher's Making Place, Making Race

In "Making Place, Making Race: Performances of Whiteness in the Jim Crow South," Steve Hoelscher uses the landscapes and performances of white Southern memory in Natchez, Mississippi to show how a dominant group created a culture of segregation that far exceeded its legal boundaries, and how racialization of "everyday geographies" is constantly being both upheld and reworked.  Hoelscher argues that modern American race relations have roots in the Southern past and especially in the Jim Crow past, so understanding the processes of Natchez' production of race in the landscape can help us understand racialization of American landscapes more generally.

Hoelscher relies on a wide variety of sources, including ethnographic research and interviews in Natchez, archival sources, including pamphlets, letters, ads, and photos, and secondary and archival sources on lynching, residential segregation, and other evidence of racialization on the landscape.

93: Ruth Rosen's The World Split Open

Ruth Rosen's The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America is a conscious attempt to excavate and describe the legacy of the women's movement - primarily second wave feminism - for generations of women (and men) who didn't live through it, so that a kind of living, breathing social history can keep the struggle for gender equality alive.  In particular, Rosen charts the change in women's consciousness from the 1950s to the 1990s through a vast compendium of the many issues, events, people, ideas, books, successes, and failures of the women’s movement in the United States, with some connections to women’s movements outside the US.

This book is written for a popular audience in response to her discovery that her undergraduate students in the 1980s had no idea what the women's movement had redefined.  Accordingly, it hits all the highlights: Betty Freidan, SNCC and other civil rights groups, the coming together of the Old and New Left in what she calls the “female generation gap,” Kennedy’s commission on women and the tension between liberal and radical feminism, NOW, Gloria Steinem, the Vietnam War, abortion, the naming of hidden injuries, sexuality, the body, intersections between feminism and race and class, protests and happenings, consciousness-raising groups, sex, pornography,  ideological factionalism, trashing, paranoia, the FBI, commodification, the superwoman, and Ronald Reagan and the spread of global feminism.  Throughout, she attempts to characterize the depth and breadth of the women’s movement as much as she can while also showing just how interconnected this historical period was.  She also tries to account for the successes and failures of the women's movement and the legacy of the movement as a whole.

Rosen's faith in the power of narrative to continue the perpetual gender revolution is clear, and I think her point that we will lose the gains we have made if we are not vigilant is a good one - just look at the attacks on affirmative action.  However, I would very much like to read a history of this iteration of the women's movement written by someone who was not there, to get a sense of the larger social and political context and a more thoroughgoing critique (instead of a celebration) of the movement itself.

91: Lisa McGirr's Suburban Warriors

In Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, Lisa McGirr traces the development of the Conservative movement in Orange County from 1945 to Reagan's presidential election in 1980; she argues that the Right used religion and consumerism to create a movement that combined an emphasis on individual experience with the collectivism required to create social change.  Using archival sources and oral histories with activists and ordinary people who helped build the conservative movement in Orange County in the 1960s, McGirr builds the history of the Conservative movement from the ground up.

McGirr's interest in telling the rise of the Right from its own perspective creates a nuanced picture of right-wing activism in Orange County.  She shows that upwardly mobile, white, educated, suburban moms and dads were attracted to Conservatism because it resonated with their own experiences as successful individuals and as Westerners who were suspicious of "liberal Washington intellectuals'" intervention in their lives.  Orange County Conservatives also included many competing worldviews, including long-held libertarianism, a religious interest in fighting godlessness and immorality, a distrust of "collectivism," and an interest in a return to American foundational values.  Anti-Communism held these libertarians and social conservatives together (along with extremist groups like the John Birch Society) in the 1950s and early 1960s.  However, after Goldwater's defeat in 1964 the Orange County Right broke with extremist groups and forged a more mainstream, populist conservative movement under Ronald Reagan that attacked general liberal permissiveness, big government, welfare, and criminality.  The parallel rise of 1960s counterculture and evangelical Christianity in the late 1960s and early 1970s brought a host of new social concerns, state welfare programs, and religious zeal for a return to morality; this stoked a fire that spread nationally and ended up getting Reagan elected president.

While McGirr's method is not innovative from a history perspective, her choice of subject is unusual for a study of social movements, as most social movement theorists include a progressive or left agenda and an association with an oppressed group in their definitions of social movements.  However, her grassroots analysis of the Right's rise to power and her interest in reading members of the Right from their own perspectives provides a depth of analysis that does justice to an incredibly powerful movement.