Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles
William Deverell and Greg Hise, eds.
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005
Land of Sunshine explores the environmental history of greater Los Angeles. Although many people might equate Los Angeles with uncontrolled sprawl, history shows that it was intensely planned. The contributors to this volume attempt to recast the region as a sustainable metropolis, highlighting regional history and the ways in which metropolitan nature has been constructed and construed for well over a century in greater Los Angeles.

A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland
John Mack Faragher
W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 2005
On Aug. 25, 1755, the New York Gazette printed a dispatch from the maritime province of Nova Scotia: “We are now upon a great and noble Scheme of sending the neutral French out of this Province.” New England troops were rounding up some 18,000 French-speaking Acadian residents at gunpoint and scattering them throughout the British Empire. Faragher brings to light a tragic chapter in the settlement of America.

Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England
Patricia Fumerton
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Poor migrants made up a growing class of workers in late-16th- and 17th-century England. By 1650, half of England’s rural population consisted of homeless and itinerant laborers. Unsettled attempts to reconstruct the everyday lives of these dispossessed people. Fumerton also explores seamen, who were a particularly large and prominent class of mobile wage laborers in the 17th century.

Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America
Margaretta Lovell
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005
Lovell positions both well-known painters and unknown artisans within the framework of their economic lives and families. Highlighting maritime settlements such as Salem, Newport, and Boston, Lovell considers the ways in which 18th-century New England experience was conditioned by its markets and the cataclysm of revolution.

Musical Metropolis: Los Angeles and the Creation of a Music Culture, 1880-1940
Kenneth Marcus
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004
Marcus argues that the study of music in Los Angeles reveals the development of the city itself. Performers and audiences came from a variety of different backgrounds, but the notion of diversity went well beyond ethnicity. A “media diversity”—recordings, radio, and film—influenced the music culture of Los Angeles, which in turn influenced America at large.

Narrating Scotland: The Imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson
Barry Menikoff
University of South Carolina Press, 2005
Narrating Scotland reveals that Stevenson’s goal was nothing less than the reconstitution in fictional form of his country’s history in the period just after the collapse of the Jacobite rebellion. Menikoff contends that in Kidnapped and David Balfour Stevenson imaginatively reconstructed that culture, in part for the sake of his nation, and for its posterity.

Sunset Limited: The Southern Pacific Railroad and the Development of the American West, 1850-1930
Richard J. Orsi
University of California Press, 2005
The Southern Pacific was the only major U.S. railroad to be operated by westerners and the only railroad built from west to east. Sunset Limited explores the railroad’s development and influence—especially as it affected land settlement, agriculture, water policy, and the environment—and offers a new perspective on the company’s role in shaping the American West.