Urban Green - by Colin Fisher (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In early twentieth-century America, affluent city-dwellers made a habit of venturing out of doors and vacationing in resorts and national parks. Yet the rich and the privileged were not the only ones who sought respite in nature. In this pathbreaking book, historian Colin Fisher demonstrates that working-class white immigrants and African Americans in rapidly industrializing Chicago also fled the urban environment during their scarce leisure time. If they had the means, they traveled to wilderness parks just past the city limits as well as to rural resorts in Wisconsin and Michigan. But lacking time and money, they most often sought out nature within the city itself--at urban parks and commercial groves, along the Lake Michigan shore, even in vacant lots. Chicagoans enjoyed a variety of outdoor recreational activities in these green spaces, and they used them to forge ethnic and working-class community. While narrating a crucial era in the history of Chicago's urban development, Fisher makes important interventions in debates about working-class leisure, the history of urban parks, environmental justice, the African American experience, immigration history, and the cultural history of nature.

Review Quotes

A useful intervention. Scholarly analyses of outdoor recreation in these decades have mostly disregarded working-class leisure, and Fisher offers a necessary correction.--Edge Effects

A welcome addition to the growing literature on the nature found in great metropolises.--Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Colin Fisher has shifted the focus of working-class, African American, and ethnic engagement with the city . . . from nightlife and commercial recreation to the pursuit and enjoyment of nature.--Western Historical Quarterly

Cultural, social, and environmental historians will benefit from exploring a side of Chicago and of working-class culture that [have] remained hidden from view.--Journal of Social History

Environmental history, labor history, urban history, transnational immigration history, and cultural history rarely come together in one teachable book, but that is what Colin Fisher has achieved in Urban Green. . . . Fisher's analysis of multiple transnational cultures of nature deserves a wide audience.--American Historical Review

Fascinating. . . . Could be required reading in social, environmental, labor, ethnic, and racial history courses as well as those in literary studies and urban sociology.--Journal of American History

Fisher's book is recommended without caveat to all environmental historians and especially to those interested in the evolution of parks and in urban social history. It is an excellent read.--Environmental History

Invaluable. . . . Deeply informed by serious scholarship and wide reading, [Fisher's] prose is as accessible as any Chicago park, open to anyone who wants to walk in and enjoy it.--Chicago Tribune

Offers a promising approach to uncovering and making sense of the ways in which urban dwellers have engaged with the outdoor world.--Western Historical Quarterly

Recommended.--Choice

About the Author

Colin Fisher is associate professor of history at the University of San Diego.