From the majestic redwoods and rocky shores in the north to the palm trees and wide, sandy beaches in the south, the California coast is an area of unsurpassed beauty and diversity.
Structured to meet employers' needs for low-wage farm workers, the well-known Bracero Program recruited thousands of Mexicans to perform physical labor in the United States between 1942 and 1964 in exchange for remittances sent back to Mexico.
Early in the morning of September 5, 2002, camouflaged and heavily armed Drug Enforcement Administration agents descended on a terraced marijuana garden.
At once informative and entertaining, inspiring and challenging, My Los Angeles provides a deep understanding of urban development and change over the past forty years in Los Angeles and other city regions of the world.
This first major examination the interrelationships of music and surfing explores different ways that surfers combine surfing with making and listening to music.
Saints and Citizens is a bold new excavation of the history of Indigenous people in California in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, showing how the missions became sites of their authority, memory, and identity.
Harvey Milk was one of the first openly and politically gay public officials in the United States, and his remarkable activism put him at the very heart of a pivotal civil rights movement reshaping America in the 1970s.
In Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity, Gaye Theresa Johnson examines interracial anti-racist alliances, divisions among aggrieved minority communities, and the cultural expressions and spatial politics that emerge from the mutual struggles of Blacks and Chicanos in Los Angeles from the 1940s to the present.
San Diego in the 1930s offers a lively account of the city's culture, roadside attractions, and history-from the days of the Spanish missions to the pre-Second World War boom.
Alive with the exuberance, contradictions, and variety of the Golden State, this Depression-era guide to California is more than 700 pages of information that is, as David Kipen writes in his spirited introduction, "e;anecdotal, opinionated, and altogether habit-forming.
Thoroughly researched and finely crafted, After the Grizzly traces the history of endangered species and habitat in California, from the time of the Gold Rush to the present.
Yoga classes and Zen meditation, New-Age retreats and nature mysticism-all are part of an ongoing religious experimentation that has surprisingly deep roots in American history.
Delving beneath Southern California's popular image as a sunny frontier of leisure and ease, this book tells the dynamic story of the life and labor of Los Angeles's large working class.
From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement is the most comprehensive history ever written on the meteoric rise and precipitous decline of the United Farm Workers, the most successful farm labor union in United States history.
This comprehensive study of the Western covers its history from the early silent era to recent spins on the genre in films such as No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, True Grit, and Cowboys & Aliens.
Why is Cinco de Mayo-a holiday commemorating a Mexican victory over the French at Puebla in 1862-so widely celebrated in California and across the United States, when it is scarcely observed in Mexico?
This unique analysis of the rise of the juvenile justice system from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries uses one of the harshest states-California-as a case study for examining racism in the treatment of incarcerated young people of color.
Embracing the crossroads that made the region distinctive this book reveals how American families have always been characterized by greater diversity than idealizations of the traditional family have allowed.
In exploring an array of intimacies between global migrants Nayan Shah illuminates a stunning, transient world of heterogeneous social relations-dignified, collaborative, and illicit.
Americans have long cherished romantic images of the frontier and its colorful cast of characters, where the cowboys are always rugged and the ladies always fragile.
Everett Ruess was twenty years old when he vanished into the canyonlands of southern Utah, spawning the myth of a romantic desert wanderer that survives to this day.
California on the Breadlines is the compelling account of how Dorothea Lange, the Great Depression's most famous photographer, and Paul Taylor, her labor economist husband, forged a relationship that was private-they both divorced spouses to be together-collaborative, and richly productive.
This is the first comprehensive environmental history of California's Great Central Valley, where extensive freshwater and tidal wetlands once provided critical habitat for tens of millions of migratory waterfowl.
Al Capone, George "e;Machine Gun"e; Kelly, Alvin Karpis, "e;Dock"e; Barker-these were just a few of the legendary "e;public enemies"e; for whom America's first supermax prison was created.
Bohemian Los Angeles brings to life a vibrant and all-but forgotten milieu of artists, leftists, and gay men and women whose story played out over the first half of the twentieth century and continues to shape the entire American landscape.
This innovative history of California opens up new vistas on the interrelationship among culture, nature, and society by focusing on the state's signature export-the orange.
Illuminating the dark side of economic globalization, this book gives a rare insider's view of the migrant farmworkers' binational circuit that stretches from the west central Mexico countryside to central California.
Paul Bontemps decided to move his family to Los Angeles from Louisiana in 1906 on the day he finally submitted to a strictly enforced Southern custom-he stepped off the sidewalk to allow white men who had just insulted him to pass by.
Among the most far-reaching effects of the modern environmental movement was the widespread acknowledgment that human beings were inescapably part of a larger ecosystem.
Two centuries after their expedition awoke the nation both to the promise and to the disquiet of the vast territory out west, Lewis and Clark still stir the imagination, and their adventure remains one of the most celebrated and studied chapters in American history.
