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Tropical Whites: The Rise of the Tourist South in the Americas Catherine Cocks. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
White North Americans in the early twentieth century did an about-face regarding tropicality; rather than posing a grave danger, the heat, palm trees, and tanned natives came to signify a reprieve from the hustle and bustle of the city and the ice and snow of America's colder climes. Catherine Cocks, a cultural historian and currently an acquisitions editor at the University of Iowa Press, argues in her latest book, Tropical Whites, that changes in science, horticulture, transportation, and the tourist industry contributed to a reimagining of what she labels the "Southland," which includes southern California, Florida, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Perhaps even more important, according to Cocks, is that these changes constituted a "redrafting of the meaning of humanity" that involved "a concession that the white supremacist civilization. . .of Europe and North America was not adequate to human happiness" (185). By examining a variety of sources, including personal diaries, family scrapbooks, government documents, advertisements, postcards, clothing trends, and travel literature, Cocks succeeds in illustrating when, why, and how governments, physicians, writers,...