| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Michael Phillips. White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841–2001. Austin: University of Texas Press. 2006. Pp. ix, 267. Cloth $60.00, paper $19.95.

A pungent prologue and an acerbic afterword constitute the more memorable parts of Michael Phillips's study of race in Dallas, Texas. At the outset, in a critique of the historiography on Dallas, the author judges other accounts as variously mythical, Whiggish, fantastic, simplistic, or neglectful; in a rare positive concession he observes that one "narrative makes for poor history, however, at least it is coherent" (p. 6). To establish the importance of his own work, Phillips makes large claims for the historical significance of Dallas. The modern partisan realignment in southern politics "began in Dallas," and the connection between right-wing Republicans and conservative Christians also started there, especially with the First Baptist Church led by W. A. Criswell (p. 2). The city's "unique geographical position" at the edges of both the South and the West should have made it a "tantalizing" historical subject (pp. 3, 2). Phillips attributes the relative neglect of the city's history to an "amnesia by design" that created instead "a myth of consensus ... in which a white male elite, ruling for the good of the 'city as a whole,' created a community 'with no reason for being' as an act of macho will" (p. 3). Philips calls it the Origin Myth, and his book seeks to overturn it by putting conflict among races, ethnic and religious groups, and social classes at the center of the city's story. According to Phillips, the concept of whiteness provides the key to his analysis.

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