{"id":3021,"date":"2013-09-01T16:48:44","date_gmt":"2013-09-01T22:48:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=3021"},"modified":"2014-07-04T09:27:09","modified_gmt":"2014-07-04T15:27:09","slug":"remembering-the-white-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=3021","title":{"rendered":"Remembering the “White City”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s edition of the Denver Post<\/i> contains an op-ed piece<\/a> I wrote about the work we\u2019re doing here in Colorado to commemorate<\/a> the 100 year anniversary of the Great Coalfield Strike of 1913-1914, especially the Ludlow Massacre<\/a>. I\u2019ve blogged about this historical event a few times before (most recently here<\/a>), focusing on its lessons for building community in today\u2019s increasingly multicultural society. \u00a0Happily, the contemporary relevance of the Strike was the Post<\/i>\u2019s primary interest when I inquired if the paper would publish a Labor Day weekend article about our work.<\/p>\n

\"LudlowWebBanner\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the section of the op-ed that dovetails with my interest in urban anthropology:<\/p>\n

The Ludlow story even has implications for urban planning and governance, especially as it concerns the growing multiculturalism of American communities.\u00a0\u00a0 Two dozen languages were spoken in Ludlow\u2019s \u201cWhite City\u201d, a description of the striker\u2019s camp that likened its canvas tents to the gleaming stucco facades of Daniel Burnham\u2019s neoclassical buildings at the 1893 Chicago World\u2019s Fair<\/a> (and that served as inspiration for the design of Denver\u2019s Civic Center Park<\/a>).\u00a0\u00a0 How did the Ludlow strikers overcome their cultural differences to maintain a long strike in a makeshift community on a desolate piece of prairie under conditions of serious economic deprivation through one of the worst winters in Colorado history?\u00a0 What shared values and identities allowed Ludlow\u2019s diverse immigrant population to re-build their community after it was devastated on April 20, 1914?\u00a0 Does Ludlow teach us anything about how to create and manage an inclusive, intercultural city?<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I hadn\u2019t been aware of the connection that the striking miners drew between Ludlow\u2019s Tent City and Chicago\u2019s White City until I read Thomas Andrews\u2019 fine book about the Coalfield Strike, Killing for Coal<\/i><\/a>.\u00a0 Tom is one of my colleagues on the Ludlow Centennial Commemoration Commission<\/a>.\u00a0 Evidence that the term was used to describe the\u00a0 striker tent colonies is found in oral interviews preserved by the Huerfano County Ethno-History Project (e.g., here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The connection between the gritty tent city and the gleaming tourist city is certainly loose. However, it\u2019s a useful entry point for discussing several aspects of the contemporary urban condition that currently bedevil us. \u00a0As I note in the last paragraph of my Post<\/i> piece, in making the tie between past and present we\u2019re limited only by our imagination.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s edition of the Denver Post contains an op-ed piece I wrote about the work we\u2019re doing here in Colorado to commemorate the 100 year anniversary of the Great Coalfield Strike of 1913-1914, especially the Ludlow Massacre. I\u2019ve blogged about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[22,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archaeology","category-intercultural-city"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-MJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3021"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3021\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3322,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3021\/revisions\/3322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}