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Whether touted for its burgeoning economy, affordable housing, and pleasant living style, or criticized for being less like a city than a sprawling suburb, Phoenix, by all environmental logic, should not exist. Yet despite its extremely hot and dry climate and its remoteness, Phoenix has grown into a massive metropolitan area. This exhaustive study examines the history of how Phoenix came into being and how it has sustained itself, from its origins in the 1860s to its present status as the nation’s fifth largest city. From the beginning, Phoenix sought to grow, and although growth has remained central to the city’s history, its importance, meaning, and value have changed substantially over the years. The initial vision of Phoenix as an American Eden gave way to the Cold War Era vision of a High Tech Suburbia, which in turn gave way to rising concerns in the late twentieth century about the environmental, social, and political costs of growth. To understand how such unusual growth occurred in such an improbable location, Philip VanderMeer explores five major themes: the natural environment, urban infrastructure, economic development, social and cultural values, and public leadership. Through investigating Phoenix’s struggle to become a major American metropolis, his study also offers a unique view of what it means to be a desert city.
Few Sunbelt cities burned brighter or contributed more to the conservative movement than Phoenix. In 1910, eleven thousand people called Phoenix home; now, over four million reside in this metropolitan region. In Sunbelt Capitalism, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer tells the story of the city's expansion and its impact on the nation. The dramatic growth of Phoenix speaks not only to the character and history of the Sunbelt but also to the evolution in American capitalism that sustained it. In the 1930s, Barry Goldwater and other members of the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce feared the influence of New Deal planners, small businessmen, and Arizona trade unionists. While Phoenix's business elite detested liberal policies, they were not hostile to government action per se. Goldwater and his contemporaries instead experimented with statecraft now deemed neoliberal. They embraced politics, policy, and federal funding to fashion a favorable "business climate," which relied on disenfranchising voters, weakening unions, repealing regulations, and shifting the tax burden onto homeowners and consumers. These efforts allied them with executives at the helm of the modern conservative movement, whose success partially hinged on relocating factories from the Steelbelt to the kind of free-enterprise oasis that Phoenix represented. But the city did not sprawl in a vacuum. All Sunbelt boosters used the same incentives to compete at a fever pitch for investment, and the resulting drain of jobs and capital from the industrial core forced Midwesterners and Northeasterners into the brawl. Eventually this "Second War Between the States" reoriented American politics toward the principle that the government and the citizenry should be working in the interest of business.
Inhabitants of Phoenix tend to think small but live big. They feel connected to individual neighborhoods and communities but drive farther to get to work, feel the effects of the regional heat island, and depend in part for their water on snow packs in Wyoming. In Metropolitan Phoenix, Patricia Gober explores the efforts to build a sustainable desert city in the face of environmental uncertainty, rapid growth, and increasing social diversity. Metropolitan Phoenix chronicles the burgeoning of this desert community, including the audacious decisions that created a metropolis of 3.6 million people in a harsh and demanding physical setting. From the prehistoric Hohokam, who constructed a thousand miles of irrigation canals, to the Euro-American farmers, who converted the dryland river valley into an agricultural paradise at the end of the nineteenth century, Gober stresses the sense of beginning again and building anew that has been deeply embedded in wave after wave of human migration to the region. In the early twentieth century, the so-called health seekers—asthmatics, arthritis and tuberculosis sufferers—arrived with the hope of leading more vigorous lives in the warm desert climate, while the postwar period drew veterans and their families to the region to work in emerging electronics and defense industries. Most recently, a new generation of elderly, seeking "active retirement," has settled into planned retirement communities on the perimeter of the city. Metropolitan Phoenix also tackles the future of the city. The passage of a recent transportation initiative, efforts to create a biotechnology incubator, and growing publicity about water shortages and school funding have placed Phoenix at a crossroads, forcing its citizens to grapple with the issues of social equity, environmental quality, and economic security. Gober argues that given Phoenix's dramatic population growth and enormous capacity for change, it can become a prototype for twenty-first-century urbanization, reconnecting with its desert setting and building a multifaceted sense of identity that encompasses the entire metropolitan community.
Phoenix is known as the "Valley of the Sun," while Tucson is referred to as "The Old Pueblo." These nicknames epitomize the difference in the public's perception of each city. Phoenix continues to sprawl as one of America's largest and fastest-growing cities. Tucson has witnessed a slower rate of growth, and has only one quarter of Phoenix's population. This was not always the case. Prior to 1920, Tucson had a larger population. How did two cities, with such close physical proximity and similar natural environments develop so differently?Desert Cities examines the environmental circumstances that led to the starkly divergent growth of these two cities. Michael Logan traces this significant imbalance to two main factors: water resources and cultural differences. Both cities began as agricultural communities. Phoenix had the advantage of a larger water supply, the Salt River, which has four and one half times the volume of Tucson's Santa Cruz River. Because Phoenix had a larger river, it received federal assistance in the early twentieth century for the Salt River project, which provided water storage facilities. Tucson received no federal aid. Moreover, a significant cultural difference existed. Tucson, though it became a U.S. possession in 1853, always had a sizable Hispanic population. Phoenix was settled in the 1870s by Anglo pioneers who brought their visions of landscape development and commerce with them.By examining the factors of watershed, culture, ethnicity, terrain, political favoritism, economic development, and history, Desert Cities offers a comprehensive evaluation that illuminates the causes of growth disparity in two major southwestern cities and provides a model for the study of bi-city resource competition.
Though the new metropolis is one of America's largest, many are unaware of Phoenix's rich and compelling history. Built on land once occupied by the most advanced pre-Columbian irrigation society, Phoenix overcame its hostile desert surroundings to become a thriving agricultural center. After World War II, its population exploded with the mid-century mass migration to the Sun Belt. In times of rapid expansion or decline, Phoenicians proved themselves to be adaptable and optimistic. Phoenix's past is an engaging and surprising story of audacity, vision, greed and a never-ending fight to secure its future. Chronicling the challenges of growth and change, fourth-generation Arizonan Jon Talton tells the story of the city that remains one of American civilization's great accomplishments.
Phoenix is the largest city in the Southwest and one of the largest urban centers in the country, yet less has been published about its minority populations than those of other major metropolitan areas. Bradford Luckingham has now written a straightforward narrative history of Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, and African Americans in Phoenix from the 1860s to the present, tracing their struggles against segregation and discrimination and emphasizing the active roles they have played in shaping their own destinies. Settled in the mid-nineteenth century by Anglo and Mexican pioneers, Phoenix emerged as an Anglo-dominated society that presented formidable obstacles to minorities seeking access to jobs, education, housing, and public services. It was not until World War II and the subsequent economic boom and civil rights era that opportunities began to open up. Drawing on a variety of sources, from newspaper files to statistical data to oral accounts, Luckingham profiles the general history of each community, revealing the problems it has faced and the progress it has made. His overview of the public life of these three ethnic groups shows not only how they survived, but how they contributed to the evolution of one of America's fastest-growing cities.
Nearly four million Americans worked on Barry Goldwater’s behalf in the presidential election of 1964. These citizens were as dedicated to their cause as those who fought for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. Arguably, the conservative agenda that began with Goldwater has had effects on American politics and society as profound and far reaching as the liberalism of the 1960s. According to the essays in this volume, it’s high time for a reconsideration of Barry Goldwater’s legacy. Since Goldwater’s death in 1998, politicians, pundits, and academics have been assessing his achievements and his shortcomings. The twelve essays in this volume thoroughly examine the life, times, and impact of “Mr. Conservative.” Scrutinizing the transformation of a Phoenix department store owner into a politician, de facto political philosopher, and five-time US senator, contributors highlight the importance of power, showcasing the relationship between the nascent conservative movement’s cadre of elite businessmen, newsmen, and intellectuals and their followers at the grassroots—or sagebrush—level. Goldwater, who was born in the Arizona Territory in 1909, was deeply influenced by his Western upbringing. With his appearance on the national stage in 1964, he not only articulated a new brand of conservatism but gave a voice to many Americans who were not enamored with the social and political changes of the era. He may have lost the battle for the presidency, but he energized a coalition of journalists, publishers, women’s groups, and Southerners to band together in a movement that reshaped the nation.