The 10th Annual Fox Cities Book Festival presents an event with author, Jerald Podair. "The opening of Dodger Stadium in April 1962 launched Los Angeles on a path to becoming a twenty-first century global supercity. But the bitter arguments over whether, where, and how to build the stadium nearly tore the city apart. Jerald Podair will read from his new book, City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles and discuss how a ballpark built on a hill overlooking downtown Los Angeles created seemingly intractable racial and class divisions in the city but also set the stage for Los Angeles to shed its provincial image and take its place as the world city we recognize today. What is a city for? What purposes should it serve? How much should “progress” cost? The people of Los Angeles fought over the answers to these questions as Dodger Stadium was built between 1957 and 1962. That battle continues in the 21st century in a modern “LA” that the stadium helped create, offering lessons to any American city wrestling with the price – human and otherwise – of growth and change."
This Fox Cities Book Festival event is free and open to all interested individuals. The presentation will take place in the first floor Shattuck Community Room at the Neenah Public Library, please join us for a wonderful event!
About the Author
"Jerald Podair is professor of history and the Robert S. French Professor of American Studies at Lawrence University, where he has taught since 1998.
He is a native New Yorker and former practicing attorney, who received his undergraduate degree from New York University, a law degree from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University.
He is the author of The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill Brownsville Crisis and Bayard Rustin: American Dreamer and co-author of American Conversations: From the Centennial through the Millennium. He also co-edits The Routledge History of the 20th Century United States.
He is presently co-writing ‘The People’s Party’: Spiro Agnew and the Birth of the New GOP for the University of Virginia Press.
He received the Society of American Historians’ Allan Nevins Prize for “literary distinction in the writing of history” and Lawrence University’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship. He is also a Fellow of the New York Academy of History.
His most recent book is City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles, published this year by Princeton University Press."