Savage Desert, American Garden: citrus labels and the selling of California, 1877-1929

In 1877, a year after the railroad reached Southern California, the first shipment of California oranges left the Los Angeles groves of William Wolfskill, bound for St. Louis, Missouri. The box-ends were branded ‘Wolfskill California Oranges’, ensuring that the geographical origins of the fruit were emphasised from the very beginning of their exportation to the Midwest and East. During the 1880s, the innovations of irrigation and refrigerated cars combined with new railroads, massive in-migration and land development to turn California into, in Douglas Sackman’s words, an ‘orange empire’. By 1900, this empire had surpassed Florida as the United States’ leading producer of fruit, while, as one historian explains, ‘the orange crop had passed the cash returns from gold’ found in California. From virtually none a few decades earlier, the average American in 1914 ate over 40 oranges per year, and orange juice had become part of the standard American breakfast. By then some thirty thousand railroad carloads—approximately twelve million orange crates—valued at $20 million, were steaming east from the Golden State each year. Adorning these crates were, in the words of Kevin Starr, ‘the inventive labels’ whose ‘selling of California along with oranges as an image in the national imagination’ are the focus of this article

Semi-tropical America: popular imagery and the selling of California and Florida, 1869-1919

This thesis examines the promotion of California and Florida from 1869 to 1919, a period when both states were transformed from remote, under-populated locales into two of the most publicised states in America. Using an interdisciplinary approach which analyses cultural representations of the states within a broader socioeconomic context, the thesis traces how railroad and land companies, agriculturists, chambers of commerce, state agencies, and journalists fashioned new identities for California and Florida as Semi- Tropical American lands. As their boosters competed in a bid to attract settlers, tourists, and investors, they played upon republican and colonialist discourses within American society and expansion. Evoking ideas about race, climate, and environment, promoters depicted California and Florida as parts of a benign middle zone between an increasingly urban-industrial North and socially “primitive” tropics. At a time of traumatic industrial change, California and Florida promised American rebirth in nature, through renewing health and leisure, prosperous agriculture, and superior cities. The selling visions were created by and for white Americans, however, and focused on the “semi-tropical” benefits for Anglo visitors and residents. Ethnic and racial minorities were marginalised as romantic, unprogressive peoples who were best suited to manual labour roles which reinforced Anglo-American progress. The thesis thus argues that boosters alloyed republican ideals of independent living to processes of racial hierarchy, creating a seductive, expansionist imagery which sold semi-tropical California and Florida

Race, Mobility, and Fantasy: Afromobiling in Tropical Florida

This article explores a popular tourist vehicle in early twentieth century Florida: the Afromobile. Beginning in the 1890s, Afromobiling referred to the white tourist experience of travelling in a wheelchair propelled by an African American hotel employee in South Florida. Most prominent in Palm Beach, these wheelchairs developed into a heavily promoted tourist activity in the region. Using promotional imagery and literary sources this paper traces the development of Afromobiling as a tourist vehicle that played upon South Florida’s tropical environs. It argues that the vehicle’s popularity related to its enactment of benign racial hierarchy and controlled black mobility. Moreover, the Afromobile infused U.S. fantasies about South Florida as a tropical and ‘oriental’ paradise for white leisure

Author\u27s Response to James J. Buckley

A response to James J. Buckley\u27s review of A Future for Truth: Evangelical Theology in a Postmodern World

A Method for Skew-free Distribution of Digital Signals Using Matched Variable Delay Lines

The ability to distribute signals everywhere in a circuit with controlled and known delays is essential in large, high-speed digital systems. We present a technique by which a signal driver can adjust the arrival time of the signal at the end of the wire using a pair of matched variable delay lines. We show an implemention of this idea requiring no extra wiring, and how it can be extended to distribute signals skew-free to receivers along the signal run. We demonstrate how this scheme fits into the boundary scan logic of a VLSI chip