Table of Contents

Prologue: The View from Fantasyland to Main Street, U.S.A.
1. Inventing the Frontier of Leisure: Charles Fletcher Lummis and the Creation of the "Great Southwest"
2. The City of Leisure: The Contested History of Public Recreation in Los Angeles
3. The Island of Leisure: Tourism and the Transformation of Santa Catalina Island, 1887-1919
4. Westward the Course of Leisure Takes Its Way: Santa Catalina in the Wrigley Era
5. The Oasis of Leisure: Palm Springs before 1941
6. Making the Desert Modern: Palm Springs after World War II
7. From Resorts to the Ranch House: Southern California's Culture of Leisure and the Making of the Suburban Sunbelt
Epilogue: The View from Mount San Jacinto
Notes
Bibliography

About the Author

Lawrence Culver is Associate Professor of History at Utah State University.

Reviews

"Beach tans, bungalows, and the California dream drive historian Culver's smart and insightful exploration of the region's lasting association with tourism and recreation."--Publisher's Weekly
"A most entertaining read and highly recommended to anyone interested in the cultural, urban, and environmental histories of the American Southwest."--H-Net
"The more Southern California is studied, the more relevant it becomes to understanding the national experience. Lawrence Culver s pioneering study, so superbly managed, chronicles the emergence of leisure as a near-Bill of Rights in the American way of living."--Kevin Starr, University of Southern California
"Radiating outward like the rays of its famous sunshine, Southern California s recreational ideas and practices have shaped the lives of Americans and culture of the nation far beyond regional boundaries. Lawrence Culver takes leisure seriously, and we're all the beneficiaries of his insight."--William Deverell, Director, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West
"The bright lights of LA have inspired the dreams of millions. In his well-written and often provocative study of how the city became the most successful tourist attraction in history, Lawrence Culver explains how it also inspired new patterns of urban growth and architecture across the United States. Anyone interested in modern sprawl and its curious relation to modern nature cannot afford to miss it."--Louis Warren, University of California, Davis
"A wonderfully fresh take on an enduring debate: Is southern California more American than the rest of America, or less? By tracing how the region translates the best and worst impulses in the American Dream into exclusive landscapes of leisure, Culver makes the compelling case that this slice of the United States with the sun in its eyes at once expresses these impulses as fully as possible and then remakes the rest of America in its own image."--Jenny Price,
author of Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America