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  • Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago by Brian McCammack
  • Joseph S. Cialdella (bio)
Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago. By Brian McCammack. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 376. $24.95 cloth)

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Environmental historians have long made the case that nature is central to understanding historical changes. In Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago, Brian McCammack invites readers to reconsider the Great Migration as not only a social, economic, and cultural movement of people, but also as an environmental experience. Through a well-researched history, McCammack successfully makes the case that "nature was never merely a political proxy for racial inequalities: it was a good in and of itself, freighted with multifaceted cultural significance that reveals black Chicagoans' modern urban lives to be more varied—and more complex—than is typically understood" (p. 7). By looking for nature and environmental values among an urban population frequently left out of environmental narratives, the work makes an important contribution to the fields of environmental and urban history, illuminating how black migrants to Chicago experienced nature inside and outside the city's limits.

McCammack looks at several landscapes to provide a closer look at the way the Great Migration era between 1915 and the 1940s shaped African Americans' connections to the environment. The book is organized into two chronological parts, with thematic chapters in each. The first chapter focuses on racial conflicts and the class politics of Chicago's Washington Park, analyzing the cultural geography of the park, incidents of racial violence, and how black reformers' ideas of respectability, uplift, and morals were "inscribed in the city's natural and landscaped environments" (p. 21). The second chapter zooms outward to look at "black Chicagoans in unexpected places," including the African American resort community of Idlewild in northern Michigan, camps for black youth in southern lower Michigan. Chapter three returns to the city, examining civil rights protests over swimming pool and beach access and Washington Park as a space for African Americans to organize labor marches and radical working-class political events. Chapter four returns to Idlewild to look at the effects of the Depression and how youth camps increasingly focused their efforts on addressing fears over youth delinquency. Chapter five jumps [End Page 623] between rural and urban areas to provide a compelling look at the role of African Americans in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), particularly those that reshaped the Cook County Forest Preserves and replanted forests in Wisconsin and Michigan during this period. Throughout each of these chapters, class dynamics within Chicago's African American communities are a central focus as they relate to how and when certain types of environmental experiences take shape.

Central to Landscapes of Hope's analytical power is its focus on the relationships between Chicago's African American communities and outlying areas, such as the northern Michigan resort town of Idlewild, CCC camps, and, closer to home, the Cook County forest preserves near the city's growing suburbs. This aligns with the approach of other environmental historians (William Cronon and David Stradling, for example). Landscapes of Hope builds on these works by looking at how the need for employment and leisure opportunities with less racial prejudice were key factors at play in shaping the environmental experiences of African Americans between the city and its hinterlands. McCammack's work also contributes to an area of environmental history looking at the experiences of African Americans that has grown substantially in recent years.

Environmental narratives about communities of color have, importantly, often focused on struggles for environmental justice from the 1970s to the present. McCammack's work makes an important contribution by telling a longer history about African American communities' connections to nature and struggles over environmental justice that are not only about the discriminatory locations of pollutants and toxins, but also about access to public spaces, the right to assemble and protest, the need for employment, and getting away from the city. In this, the work makes a clear and important contribution to illustrate African Americans' contributions to shaping the landscapes so many Americans now use and enjoy.

McCammack does not...

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