Power Lines (ebook)

Argumento de Power Lines (ebook)

"Needham’s work is remarkable in its ability to draw together a range of actors, sites, scales, and technologies involved in the uneven development of not just Phoenix or the Navajo, but the entire Southwest. By making these connections visible, Power Lines is an important piece of scholarship for those interested in how energy, and electricity in particular, shapes the lives of people located in very different, yet connected, locations."--Conor Harrison, Planning Perspectives

"Rarely does a work of history unite so many seemingly disconnected fields of inquiry in such new and exciting ways. Masterfully interweaving urban, Native American, and environmental history, Power Lines is a sobering assessment of Phoenix's expansive postwar development. The legacies of the region's coal-powered history continue to shape contemporary politics, spaces, and our shared environmental future, making Power Lines as timely as it is insightful."--Ned Blackhawk, Yale University

"What is the price of power? In modern America, the answer, as Needham reveals in this pioneering book, is heartbreaking. After reading Power Lines, one will never think about cities, Native Americans, or even the simple act of switching on the air conditioner the same way ever again."--Karl Jacoby, Columbia University

"Power Lines shakes up a field that I thought was unshakable. In this marvelous book, Needham captures the nature of modern suburbia within the framework of something that is at once obvious and invisible: electricity. From the coal dug up and burned on Navajo land to feed a million Phoenix air conditioners to the Colorado River's tempting gigawatts, which served as the Cold War's hidden fuel, Power Lines tells the indispensable history of the metropolitan Southwest."--Robert O. Self, Brown University

"Power Lines is a sweeping reassessment of how energy, political economy, and environmental transformation are at the core of regional development in the postwar United States. The story here is particular to Phoenix, but it has analogs elsewhere, from Los Angeles to New York City. A complex, ambitious, and dynamically rich book."--Matthew Klingle, author of Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle

"A complex and provocative analysis."--Julie Cohn, Environmental History

"Power Lines is an important contribution to urban, environmental, and western history."--Adam Rome, Journal of American History

"Needham’s disciplined focus on the mechanisms of power in the modern Southwest does much to clarify the origins of modern America--and to demonstrate the utter centrality of indigenous people to that story."--James Rice, AlterNative

Winner of the 2015 Caughey Western History Prize, Western History Association
Winner of the 2015 George Perkins Marsh Prize, American Society for Environmental History
Winner of a 2015 Southwest Book Award, Border Regional Library Association
Winner of the 2015 David J. Weber-Clements Prize, Western History Association
Winner of the 2015 Hal K. Rothman Prize, Western History Association0Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Beyond the Crabgrass Frontier 1
Part I: Fragments
Chapter 1: A Region of Fragments 23
Part II: Demand
Chapter 2: The Valley of the Sun 55
Chapter 3: Turquoise and Turboprops 91
Part III: Supply
Chapter 4: Modernizing the Navajo 123
Chapter 5: Integrating Geographies 157
Part IV: Protest
Chapter 6: The Living River 185
Chapter 7: A Piece of the Action 213
Conclusion: "Good Bye, Big Sky": Coal and
Postwar America 246
Abbreviations of Sources and Collections 259
Notes 261
Index 311