Historical Society of Southern California

Unfortunately, the bibliography is only a token bibliography and is of very little help to the local amateur historian, and the more serious historian would need to turn to county records, newspapers, diaries and some of the primary materials such as documents to fill in this book. Because the writing of each chapter is uneven the photographs are used to carry the narrative, however, in many instances this historical presentation often serves to only whet the appetite of the reader to research into the background of the particular photograph. Although the historical text is a bit too thin, and some of the areas of the history of Pomona were emphasized at the expense of other areas (here we are in the realm of judgement) still the committee is to be commended. Laying aside the hoopla of municipal mumbo-jumbo (such as the "vision of the early founders," and other small outbursts of civic pride) the text has a ring of honesty and integrity. The basic facts are accurate and the average reader does obtain a fairly general picture of the city of Pomona and its colorful past. Urban history is a new field of research, and urban classics such as Glaab and Brown, or Callow's Urban America or even Holborn and Kramer, eds., The City in American Life, are rare indeed. Writing the history of one city is as dangerous as doing a biography both enterprises are a form of entrapment for the historian so one should be kind to fledgling writers without taking c>n a patronizing air. In his famous essay, "A Panoramic View: The City in American History," Arthur M. Schlesinger writes: "When the city encroaches sufficiently on the country and the country on the city, there will come an opportunity for the development of a type of civilization such as the world has never known." This is what the Pomona Centennial History is trying to convey to the reader in its big picture book. Ask your library to buy this photographic panorama. It recaptures yesterday as it really was. Dr. Polos is presently professor of history in La Verne College.