Tropic Of Hopes: California, Florida, And The Selling Of American Paradise, 1869-1929 [Hardcover]

Pushes aside the palm fronds celebrated by boosters to explain how the nineteenth-century frontiers of barren southern California and waterlogged southern Florida were reimagined as havens for American leisure and agriculture. This is the story of the birth of modern America.Anthony J. Stanonis, author of Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 19181945

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A refreshingly original and subtly nuanced study of how nineteenth- and twentieth-century boosters sold Florida and California as semi-tropical lands worthy of serious attention. With clarity and insight, Knight provides an instructive and provocative look at the peculiar machinations of identity formation in America.Rebecca McIntyre, author of Souvenirs of the Old South: Northern Tourism and Southern Mythology

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