Landscapes of Hope

Since American environmental history emerged nearly fifty years ago, it has grown into a dynamic and diverse field with thematic boundaries that overlap with many historical disciplines. This overlap is evident in Brian McCammack's excellent book, which integrates a rich array of sources and historiographies in a revealing narrative about African Americans in Chicago during the interwar period. Unlike many other environmental histories pertaining to race and social justice, it does not focus on the blight often characteristic of segregated urban neighborhoods. Rather than address these “landscapes of despair,” the author casts his eye on “landscapes of hope” and examines how black Chicagoans used urban parks and beaches and county forest preserves, and how they imagined the salutary benefits of these nearby pastoral landscapes and of more rural resorts and summer camps. By revealing how they used these urban parks and pastoral landscapes and participated in regional Civilian Conservation Corps reclamation projects, the author enriches the social history of black Chicago during the Great Migration and the Great Depression. He does the same for civil rights history by detailing community struggles to integrate Chicago parks and beaches and enhance the quality of segregated playgrounds, summer camps, and rural resorts. Lastly, he shows that an early scholarly thread of environmental history, focused on cultural discourses on the salutary effect of parks and nature on white urbanites, applies to the African American experience as well. Chicago's black press and economic elite promoted the physical and moral benefits of healthful activity in parks and natural landscapes. Counting on these spots to develop character among working-class South Siders—just as rural resort communities such as Idlewood did for its middle class—they helped make these leisure spaces available through philanthropy and public advocacy. Community leaders also exhibited intraracial paternalism by discouraging rowdy recreation and rambunctious activities, behavior that may have offended their bourgeois sensibilities but that they impugned for reinforcing racist discrimination against African Americans

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