Monterey, California is home to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and provided the setting for John Steinbeck's novel "Cannery Row", yet the city's coastline was also the stage for a great shift in the junction of industry and tourism. This book looks at the ways in which Monterey has formed, and been formed by, the tension between labour and leisure.

Foreword: On the Shore between Work and Play / William CrononAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Voice of the Pacific1. Contested Shores2. The Divided Coastline3. Reduce and Prosper4. Life, Labor, and Odors on Cannery Row5. Boom and Bust in Wartime Monterey6. Remaking Cannery Row7. The Fish Are Back!ConclusionNotesSelected BibliographyIndex

"Chiang deftly shows how these two competing economies [fishing and tourism] were deeply entangled, how they developed and how they both perpetuated racial and class hierarchies and rested upon an edifice of immigrant labor. In a book that refreshingly blends the history of tourism and industry over the course of a century, Chiang rejects 'oversimplified dualities' and 'simple dichotomies.'."

"Today the Monterey Bay Aquarium publicly embraces both fish and tourism within the confines of an old cannery. The two histories have coexisted for years, and they spawned a diverse and divided society. Therein lies Connie Chiang's fascinating and revealing story of the people of Monterey and the sea that gave them life."

Today the Monterey Bay Aquarium publicly embraces both fish and tourism within the confines of an old cannery. The two histories have coexisted for years, and they spawned a diverse and divided society. Therein lies Connie Chiang's fascinating and revealing story of the people of Monterey and the sea that gave them life. -- Richard White, Stanford University A compelling narrative that is, at once, a social history of Monterey and an environmental history of the region that begins at the turn of the century and ends in the present day. -- Carol McKibbenDirectorSeaside History Project and, author of Beyond Cannery Row Shaping the Shoreline brilliantly explores-and explodes-the dualities that have long defined not only Monterey but also American thinking about the natural world: work vs. play, white vs. non-white, tourism vs. industry, nature as spectacle vs. nature as worksite. -- Karl Jacoby, Brown University For two decades, scholars have been calling for environmental histories that pay as much attention to changes in human social relationships as to changes in the natural world. Shaping the Shoreline demonstrates the value of such an approach with great subtlety and insight by exploring how the curiously intermingled worlds of commercial fishing and elite tourism created one of the most celebrated and sought-after communities on the coast of California. -- William Cronon, University of Wisconsin