| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Mythic Galveston: Reinventing America's Third Coast. By Susan Wiley Hardwick. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. xiv, 175 pp. $42.95, ISBN 0-8018-6887-4.)

Susan Wiley Hardwick provides a geographer's perspective to her important new study of Galveston, Texas. Focusing on spatial and social relationships resulting from immigrant settlement patterns, she made use of federal census reports, Galveston's Rosenberg Library, city directories, and archival material to construct a database crucial to her analysis. Among the book's significant conclusions, the author's assessment that Galveston's loss of population and economic power resulted from near total control by a cadre of elite, southern-born businessmen provides a more accurate explanation of the city's decline than the popular belief that attributes responsibility to the catastrophic 1900 hurricane. Furthermore, she argues that this control explains Galveston's failure to regain its early dominance, when it served as a major gateway for Russian Jews and other immigrants, and belies the city's reputation as an egalitarian, cosmopolitan, and multicultural city.

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