Richard P. Horwitz

The Weather Matters: An American Cultural History since 1900 (review)

not the city that its leading figures believe it to be—a city of great dreams, of progress, created by an incessant growth machine, at the crossroads of America, neither West nor South. For every claim that residents make about their city, Graff is willing to dispute that claim: the city is not what people think it is, he says, but rather is just the opposite. There is a great deal of material which he digests and employs in this discursive treatment, including a number of the seminal writings about cities by urban theorists. Graff uses this material to provide a varied set of interpretations of Dallas, on the ambitions of its leaders as well as the sense that leading figures believe the city has no history, that it is always just on the edge of greatness. Indeed, he takes on this claim directly by arguing as an historian that it must have a history, but he never fully and completely conveys what the central and driving elements of that history might be and of, how, in particular, Dallas is unique and singular rather than just like every other settlement on the frontier. University of Illinois at Chicago Anthony M. Orum