Lawrence Culver

Lawrence Culver teaches in the Department of History at Utah State University. His interests include U.S. cultural, environmental, and urban history, the history of the U.S. West and U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and the histories of architecture, tourism, and recreation. He completed his doctorate at UCLA, and his dissertation received the 2005 Rachel Carson Prize for best dissertation (U.S. or World) from the American Society for Environmental History. That dissertation served as the basis for his first book, The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America. In it, he recounts how the resorts of Southern California -- places such as Palm Springs and Santa Catalina Island -- and public recreation in the parks and on the beaches of Los Angeles shaped the development of the region, and, through regional promotion and the power of Hollywood, shaped the development of suburban homes, neighborhoods, and Sunbelt culture and politics across the nation in the decades after World War II.