Misplacing Ogden, Utah
Race, Class, Immigration, and the Construction of Urban Reputations
Description:... "Certain cities in the United States have long had reputations attached to them that in one way or another are as deserved as they are unwarranted. Las Vegas, New York City, San Francisco, and New Orleans, are a few that come to mind. These cities have familiar identities in the American imagination, either as disreputable or reputable places, and often it's a combination of both. The process by which a city comes into a reputation is a long and complicated one. In "Sin City of the American Holy Land," Pepper Glass looks for the origins and tracks the development of Ogden, Utah's, reputation as an undesirable, or at least less desirable, place to live in Utah, or what Glass calls "the American Holy Land." Glass's purpose is to study the cultural processes that create and maintain reputations of place, using Ogden as a case study. The main way he does so is through his exploratory use of "boundary work," by which privileged groups define both what they are and what they are not relative to others. Glass takes up issues of race, class, and immigration to show how the construction of boundaries along these lines has resulted in a negative reputation for Ogden compared to neighboring Salt Lake City or other cities in the region"--
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