| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America. By Carl Abbott. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. x, 347 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8263-3312-4.)

This ably conceived and especially readable study narrates over four centuries of the urban history of western North America—the area from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mississippi River and the Mexican border. Carl Abbott, a distinguished urban historian, in fifteen sometimes very brief chapters incorporates extensive urban scholarship on early cities as seats of empire; urban rivalry as a central theme of early city history; garden, mining and tourist cities; water and the city based on irrigation; distinctive western city building and housing patterns (the emergence of the bungalow and the creative architecture of Los Angeles, for example); and immigration, ethnicity, and race. In his later chapters he argues that since the 1940s western cities have ceased to be reflective of general change and have been transformed into primary instruments in a process of global transformation. The author, to cite only one example of original scholarship, makes a significant contribution to the standard conception of western cities as spearheads of the frontier with his discussion of the founding of north-south gateway cities extending from Winnipeg to San Antonio. The scholarship discussed in the extensive chapter bibliographies and detailed notes make this brief book a valuable reference tool as well as an unusually readable general account.

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