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Dissertation Information for Kyle Mitchell Livie

NAME:
- Kyle Mitchell Livie

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2007)

ADVISORS:
- Janice L. Reiff

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Mary Yeager
- Blake Allmendinger
- Valerie Matsumoto

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Wide open spaces: Rural communities and the making of metropolitan California, 1870--1940

Abstract: This dissertation explores the development of rural communities in California from the end of the Gold Rush to the eve of World War II and their relationship with the metropolitan areas they inhabited. Elaborating upon William Cronon's understanding of rural-urban interchange, I focus on two communities as case studies: Petaluma, situated forty miles north of San Francisco and home to early industrial egg production, and Glendora, thirty miles east of downtown Los Angeles in Southern California's citrus belt. By the beginning of the twentieth century, these communities were resilient centers of culture and economy that influenced metropolitan economic development. As they developed over time, both places created unique identities through the creation of promotional communal cultures, which helped assert their interests while constructing local hierarchies of power on the basis of class, race, and location. Eventually these communal cultures, no longer connected solely to economic gain, became performed and ritualized in the community, as well as recognized in the larger metropolitan sphere.

Petaluma's communal culture, wedded to the social and economic implications of specialized egg production as the self-proclaimed "egg basket to the world," helped sell commodities as well as the town itself, calcifying local industrial and cultural power over several generations. In contrast, Glendora's communal culture was based in promoting a residential, suburban form from its earliest days. Even as the local economy became reliant on the regional citrus industry, community promotion as a residential "home city" in the 1920s and 1930s minimized citrus and instead celebrated the elite, white identity of the town in contrast to the citrus colonias of the countryside. In both communities, the creation of complex, communal cultures around social ties, residential settlement, and agricultural production led to a revolution in how landscapes--real and imagined--were understood. Both Petaluma and Glendora serve as powerful examples of how rural communities--and those who led them--were powerful agents in shaping metropolitan forms throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As such, Petaluma and Glendora help challenge assumptions about the relationship of city and countryside as they help lay the foundation for post-war exurban settlement.

MPACT Scores for Kyle Mitchell Livie

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TA = 0
calculated 2008-08-07 14:49:09

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Students under Kyle Mitchell Livie

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None