largely replaced bathing areas outside. Municipal swimming pools were built in locations that served mostly lower-class and working-class residents, assuring that the pools would generally be segregated by class. Although there were no rules segregating the pools by sex, women tended to have different work schedules than men and swam at different times. During the same years, middle-class and upper-class people began to build and operate private pools, whose membership fees effectively excluded the lower classes. As Wiltse describes it, the municipal pools had a “play and pleasure-centered culture,” while the private pools “had developed a more serious and orderly culture that reflected the competitive and directed character of Victorian culture.” In other words, swimmers in the private pools were encouraged to get into the water, swim a determined number of laps for fitness, and get out. Swimming was, in the minds of middle-class people, for exercise, not for fun.

The idea of fun was problematic for some municipal governments. While politicians and bureaucrats were firm believers in spending public money for swimming pools when they were intended to contribute to citizens’ physical and moral development, these same men had doubts about whether providing recreation was an appropriate use for public funds. Boston mayor Josiah Quincy was an early champion of the idea that poor children needed amusement, and he opened two pools in 1898 within Roxbury, one of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods. Throughout his tenure as mayor, Quincy worked to provide enhanced opportunities for the “average citizen.” Himself a member of one of Boston’s oldest and wealthiest families, he drew down the anger of the upper classes upon himself when he attempted to introduce a public pool, to be open to all the social classes, in Boston Common, near the homes of the elite. Although he did not win support for this project, his success at opening other pools for poor children’s recreational use “transcended the limits of nineteenth-century municipal function” and began a new era. Quincy’s example made it easier, for example, for J. Frank Foster, a park superintendent in South Chicago, to advocate for swimming pools near the city’s stockyards and steel mills.

As Wiltse traces the history of municipal pools, other broad social trends are revealed. The earliest pools, as already shown, demonstrated de facto segregation along class lines, although men and women were able (but unlikely) to swim together, and poor whites and African Americans swam together without incident. By the beginning of the twentieth century, males and females were required to swim separately, typically on different days, as public officials came to fear that the increasing familiarity with which men and women behaved toward each other in public might lead to disastrous consequences in the water. This gender segregation did not last. Between the two world wars, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) built huge and elaborate “resort pools” with expansive lawns and decks and even sandy beaches. Men and womenwearing considerably less than the ten yards of fabric that previously had been required for a woman’s swimming costumeswam together, and families spent entire days lounging, splashing, picnicking, and sunbathing. Ironically, the opening up of swimming pool culture to accepting nearly naked men and women in the same space led to the exclusion of African Americans. For white America, the idea of an African American male being in such an intimate space with white women was unthinkable.

The most compelling chapters of Contested Waters deal with the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and the 1960’s and efforts to integrate public pools. Thurgood Marshall, who would later argue the landmark school integration case Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and then become a U.S. Supreme Court justice, appears here as a legal consultant in cases involving segregated swimming. As local chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sued their cities for the rights of African American citizens to swim in public pools, they found that for many whites, integrating swimming pools was actually “more sensitive than schools.” Wiltse describes in chilling detail the taunts and the violence that African American children endured before finally winning the right to swim in taxpayer-supported facilities. Sadly, as the closing chapters reveal, once public pools were integrated, whites largely stopped using them and began to build backyard or private neighborhood pools. Through the next decades, fewer people used the municipal pools, and many fell into disrepair and were closed.

Some of the most revelatory offerings in the books are the photographs, nearly two dozen, reaching back to the nineteenth century. These images not only illustrate the different ways the pools themselves have looked throughout their history but also enhance the emotional weight of the most poignant social moments: One boy looks over a brick wall to spy on girls in their short-sleeved knee-length swimming dresses; bathing beauties in one-piece suits and sashes pose on a diving board; two African American teenagers watch through a chain-link fence as white children play in a segregated pool. While much of the material in the book addresses broad trends and large groups of people, the photographs help the reader remember that the groups are made up of individuals with personal reasons for wanting to swim.

In his acknowledgments, Wiltse thanks his advisers and financial supporters at Brandeis University for aiding him in the dissertation research that led ultimately to Contested Waters. Although this book has received attention in the popular press, its publication by the scholarly University of North Carolina Press is no accident. Wiltse’s research is thorough, and thoroughly documented, and his prose style is only steps away from dissertation-speak. Most chapters begin with an abstract and end with a summary, so points and people and anecdotes are frequently brought up three or more times. Describing people relaxing and having fun, Wiltse tends to use language that reflects the library more than the pool, as when he explains that people enjoyed going to municipal pools during the interwar years because, “unlike at most public spaces, the social contact was sustained and interactive,” or when he describes the changes in bathing attire after women and men started swimming together as “the subsequent downsizing of swimsuits,” which led to swimmers “visually consuming” each other’s bodies. Nevertheless, Wiltse has done a remarkable job of finding and synthesizing a large body of material, most of it never considered seriously before, and the narrative he presents is fresh and importantso much so that Contested Waters has been awarded the 2007 William F. “Buck” Dawson Author’s Award by the International Swimming Hall of Fame.