Reviewed by:

• Fort Worth between the World Wars by Harold Rich
• Brian Cervantez

Fort Worth history has been enjoying a renaissance of late, and those interested in the topic no longer need to rely on Oliver Knight's 1953 Fort Worth: Outpost on the Trinity (University of Oklahoma Press) as their principal source. Although Knight's book certainly had its strengths, it overlooked the experiences and contributions of African Americans and [End Page 111] Latinos, failed to discuss the implementation and maintenance of Jim Crow, and generally provided a sunny, boosterish evaluation of the city's development. Over the last decade, Fort Worth has been front and center in scholarly works such as J'Nell Pate's Arsenal of Defense: Fort Worth's Military Legacy (Texas State Historical Association, 2013), Harold Rich's Fort Worth: Outpost, Cowtown, Boomtown (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), and Richard Selcer's A History of Fort Worth in Black and White: 165 Years of African-American Life (University of North Texas Press, 2016). All of these contributions to the city's growing historiography have done much to place Fort Worth's development in larger national and urban contexts, and Rich's new book is no exception.

As its title suggests, this book is a broad survey of the city's political, social, economic, and cultural development between the world wars. In that sense it is a broader look at the city's past than the author's previous work, which focused on economics and business developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rich's Fort Worth is a city struggling with its status as an urban center, one where modernity and traditionalism collide in a southwestern context. The racial and cultural clashes of the 1920s, exhibited by the rise and fall of the Ku Klux Klan, prohibition, and firebrand preachers such as J. Frank Norris, unfold against a backdrop of a stagnating local economy.

That last point gets at one of the strengths of Rich's work, for it reveals that, instead of relying on traditional narratives of the 1920s as a decade of population growth and economic development, he conducts his own analysis. He notes that the Fort Worth economy during the 1920s actually declined after having experienced rapid growth the previous decade, and that the population growth that occurred was primarily the result of aggressive annexation of outlying communities. Tarrant County, anchored by Fort Worth, entered the 1920s as the largest manufacturing economy in Texas and the center of the state's oil industry, but by 1940 it had fallen behind Harris County and Dallas in manufacturing and the Midland-Odessa area in the oil industry. As Rich argues, the decline of Fort Worth's petroleum and defense industries and "Houston's rise were the major economic issues for Fort Worth in the years separating the two world wars (229)." And as he points out, the decline of these two major industries in Fort Worth was out of the city's control because they were attributed to the decline in defense spending in peacetime and the discovery of oil in other parts of Texas.

Throughout the narrative, Rich humanizes the story of a city's journey through the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression, providing more than a cursory glance at how various groups fared in these two decades. Chapters on the experiences of women and African Americans as well as on crime, vice, and entertainment are given attention equal to the city's economic and political affairs. All of this is enriched by his attentiveness [End Page 112] to detail and ability to mine sources such as newspapers, oral histories, censuses, police department reports, Chamber of Commerce data, and city council minutes. The result is a rich narrative that enhances both our understanding of Fort Worth's past and of urban development in the Southwest.

审核人：

• 哈罗德·里奇（Harold Rich）在两次世界大战之间的沃思堡
• 布赖恩·塞万提斯

沃思堡的历史最近一直在复兴，对这个话题感兴趣的人不再需要依赖奥利弗奈特 1953 年的沃思堡：三位一体前哨（俄克拉荷马大学出版社）作为他们的主要来源。尽管奈特的书确实有其优势，但它忽略了非裔美国人和[End Page 111]拉丁美洲人的经验和贡献，没有讨论 Jim Crow 的实施和维护，并且总体上对这座城市的发展提供了一个阳光明媚的、鼓舞人心的评价。在过去的十年中，沃思堡一直是学术著作的前沿和中心，例如 J'Nell Pate 的《国防军火库：沃斯堡的军事遗产》（德克萨斯州历史协会，2013 年）、Harold Rich 的沃思堡：前哨、牛城、新兴城市（俄克拉荷马大学出版社，2014 年）和理查德·塞尔瑟的《黑白相间的沃思堡历史：165 年非裔美国人生活》（北德克萨斯大学出版社，2016 年）。所有这些对这座城市不断发展的历史编纂的贡献，都为将沃思堡的发展置于更大的国家和城市背景中做出了很大贡献，里奇的新书也不例外。

正如书名所暗示的那样，本书是对两次世界大战期间这座城市的政治、社会、经济和文化发展的广泛调查。从这个意义上说，与作者之前的作品相比，它更广泛地审视了这座城市的过去，后者侧重于 19 世纪末和 20 世纪初的经济和商业发展。Rich's Fort Worth 是一座城市中心地位的城市，现代性和传统主义在西南环境中相互碰撞。1920 年代的种族和文化冲突，体现在三K党的兴衰、禁令以及 J. Frank Norris 等煽动性传教士，在当地经济停滞的背景下展开。

最后一点体现了里奇作品的一个优势，因为它表明，他并没有依赖于 1920 年代作为人口增长和经济发展的十年的传统叙述，而是进行了自己的分析。他指出，沃思堡经济在经历了前十年的快速增长后，实际上在 1920 年代出现了下滑，而发生的人口增长主要是边远社区激进兼并的结果。以沃思堡为中心的塔兰特县进入 1920 年代成为德克萨斯州最大的制造业经济体和该州石油工业的中心，但到 1940 年它在制造业方面落后于哈里斯县和达拉斯，在石油工业方面落后于米德兰 - 敖德萨地区. 正如里奇所说，沃思堡石油和国防工业的衰落以及“

在整个叙事过程中，里奇将一个城市在咆哮的二十年代和大萧条中的旅程人性化，提供了对不同群体在这两个十年中的表现的粗略一瞥。关于女性和非裔美国人的经历以及犯罪、罪恶和娱乐的章节受到与该市经济和政治事务同等的关注。所有这一切都得益于他对细节的关注[End Page 112]以及挖掘诸如报纸、口述历史、人口普查、警察局报告、商会数据和市议会会议记录等来源的能力。结果是丰富的叙述增强了我们对沃思堡过去和西南城市发展的理解。