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Description of  American Mediterraneans: A Study in Geography, History, and Race

0226819663 pdf The story of the American Mediterranean, both an idea and a shorthand popularized by geographers, historians, novelists, and travel writers from the early nineteenth century to the 1970s. The naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, visiting the Gulf-Caribbean in the early nineteenth century, called it Americas Mediterranean. Almost a century later, Southern California was hailed as Our Mediterranean, Our Italy! Although American Mediterranean is not a household phrase in the United States today, it once circulated widely in French, Spanish, and English as a term of art and folk idiom. In this book, Susan Gillman asks what cultural work is done by this kind of unsystematic, open-ended comparative thinking. Read more