Bulldozer Revolutions

"With Montgomery County, Texas and Loudoun County, Virginia as case studies, this book integrates rural, environmental, and agricultural history into the history of the southern metropolis in a way that calls urban historians to explore the city's impact beyond suburbia and that challenges rural historians to allow these dynamic metropolitan rural areas to destabilize their larger narrative of a rural America left behind. The work examines the gentlemen farmers, historical preservationists, and nature-seeking suburbanites who abandoned the city to live in this countryside. These privileged white newcomers formed the vanguard of the anti-growth movement that defined metropolitan fringe politics across the nation. In the rural South, these activists obscured the troubling legacies of racism and rural poverty and celebrated a refashioned landscape whose historical and environmental authenticity implicitly critiqued of the alienation and ugliness of suburbia. Using a source base that includes the records of preservation organizations, local, state, and federal government agencies, and oral histories, this project explores the distinct roots of the environmental politics and the shifting relationship between city and country within these metropolitan fringe regions"--