The Santa Clara Valley, with its rich soil and sunny weather, has been home to great diversity and great innovation long before it became known as Silicon Valley. California's first immigrants from Mexico were astonished by its beauty. "The land is moist and the hills have an abundance of rosemary and herbs, sunflowers in bloom, vines as plentiful as a vineyard," wrote one. From the movie stars of Hollywood's golden era who once came to play to billionaires who grew apricots for pleasure, the valley has hosted orchards, electric railroads, Army camps and even a love-struck poet. Join author and historian Robin Chapman as she uncovers the true tales of this ever-changing place.

This agricultural history explores the transformation of the Santa Clara Valley over the past one hundred years from America's largest fruit-producing region into the technology capital of the world. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the region's focus shifted from fruits—such as apricots and prunes—to computers. Both personal and public rhetoric reveals how a sense of place emerges and changes in an evolving agricultural community like the Santa Clara Valley. Through extensive archival research and interviews, Anne Marie Todd explores the concepts of place and placelessness, arguing that place is more than a physical location and that exploring a community's sense of place can help us to map how individuals experience their natural surroundings and their sense of responsibility towards the local environment. Todd extends the concept of sense of place to describe Silicon Valley as a non-place, where weakened or disrupted attachment to place threatens the environment and community. The story of the Santa Clara Valley is an American story of the development of agricultural lands and the transformation of rural regions.

The history of the heart of the high-tech world Mike Malone is a journalist who has covered Silicon Valley for nearly twenty years. This book combines the best of his work from a variety of renowned publications to offer a true-to-life glimpse of the world's most important industrial community. These stories form a picture of a place at the center of cultural, economic, and technological advancement and the people who live there, from dot.com millionaires to everyday working people just trying to get by. Not confined to its present technological significance, the book looks at the rich history of the Valley and the future that awaits it. Meticulously researched and broad in scope, The Valley of Heart's Delight is the definitive biography of a place of massive cultural and political significance. Michael S. Malone (Palo Alta, CA) joined the San Jose Mercury News in 1980 as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter. His writings on Silicon Valley earned him two Pulitzer Prize nominations. He has also written for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Dallas Morning News, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. He is currently the Editor at Large for ASAP.

This unique Companion showcases the importance of valleys and their socio-economic, physical and cultural landscapes across three continents. Expert scholars in the field offer a broad range of disciplinary perspectives on the topic, discussing key historical and contemporary issues governing and transforming valleys.

Moving past the conflation of state socialism with all socialist projects, this book opens up avenues for addressing socialist projects rooted in decolonial and antiracist politics. To that end, this anthology brings together scholarship across regions that engages postsocialism as an analytic that connects the ‘afters’ of the capitalist– socialist dynamic to present day politics. Resisting the revolutionary teleology of what was before, “postsocialism” can function to create space to work through ongoing legacies of socialisms in the present. Looking at the Middle East, Scandanavia, Korea, Romania, China, and the US, the chapters in this book assess ongoing socialist legacies in new ethical collectivities and networks of dissent opposing state- and corporate- based military, economic, and cultural expansionism since the end of the Cold War. The majority of the chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Social Identities.

Cousette Copeland's Silicon Valley: Fact and Fiction is a historical record of the changes that occurred in Silicon Valley from 1961 to present. It is part history, part memoir, rich with photographs, and with a little poetry and fiction. Silicon Valley: Fact and Fiction is an exploration of Silicon Valley's complex Landscape and Industrial Changes, Ethnic Identity, San Jose's rich cultural arts, San Jose State University's place in International kendo, and Silicon Valley's high-tech world. Copeland's book describes her contacts with lesser-known, but much loved citizens of San Jose, as well as with well-known figures, such as Poet Robert Bly, Nobel Prize Winner Doris Lessing, and Cirque du Soleil star Vladimir Kekhaial. Copeland reveals 'hidden' treasures about San Jose State University, Poetry Center San Jose, Upstairs at Eulipia, and more. Her intimate history is as one of the people who make up Silicon Valley's talented and diverse population. It is a personal and fascinating view of the time in which 'The Valley of Heart's Delight' became 'Silicon Valley!'