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Reviewed by:
  • The Dallas Myth: The Making and Unmaking of An American City
  • Anthony M. Orum
The Dallas Myth: The Making and Unmaking of An American City. By Harvey J. Graff. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2008.

Nowadays there are two styles of writing urban history. The first is what one might call the "bricks and mortars" style: it pays attention to the vivid details of the history, to the key actors and to the built landscape of the city. The second is what one might call the "bells and whistles" style. It devotes itself to the symbols and culture of the city, seeking to show how those elements constitute the real history of a place. Harvey Graff's new book can definitely be placed in the "bells and whistles" category for it is not so much a history of Dallas as it is a history of the way Dallas thinks of itself, as seen through the eyes of elite figures and historians of the city.

For many years a member of the faculty at the University of Texas at Dallas, Graff made important contributions to the historiography of the city as well as to its dissemination. He organized seminars on the city, gave countless speeches to various groups, wrote brochures on key elements and features of Dallas, and, according to his account, he produced students who wrote a number of important papers and thesis about the city. But until now he never actually wrote a full and lengthy treatise on Dallas. And, as he states in the introduction, this was not an easy book to write. Nor is it an easy book to read and to understand.

If you want some of your bricks and mortars about the city they are here, scattered throughout in a collection of diagrams and appendices that will be invaluable to other researchers. But most of all Graff wants to leave the reader with the sense that Dallas is [End Page 186] 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.

Anthony M. Orum
University of Illinois at Chicago
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