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.
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.
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.
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.
From Sacagawea's travels with Lewis and Clark to rock groupie Pamela Des Barres's California trips, women have moved across the American West with profound consequences for the people and places they encounter.
Taming the Elephant is the last of four volumes in the distinguished California History Sesquicentennial Series, an outstanding compilation of original essays by leading historians and writers.
The Railroad Age, The Depression, World War II, The Atomic Age, The Sixties-these periods shaped and were in turn shaped by Berkeley, California-a city that has had a remarkable influence given its modest size.
In this powerful and evocative narrative, Gail Lee Bernstein vividly re-creates the past three centuries of Japanese history by following the fortunes of a prominent Japanese family over fourteen generations.
Wide-Open Town traces the history of gay men and lesbians in San Francisco from the turn of the century, when queer bars emerged in San Francisco's tourist districts, to 1965, when a raid on a drag ball changed the course of queer history.
First published in 1999, this celebrated history of San Francisco traces the exploitation of both local and distant regions by prominent families-the Hearsts, de Youngs, Spreckelses, and others-who gained power through mining, ranching, water and energy, transportation, real estate, weapons, and the mass media.
Peter Schrag takes on the big issues-immigration, globalization, and the impact of California's politics on its quality of life-in this dynamic account of the Golden State's struggle to recapture the American dream.
At the turn of the twentieth century, two distinct, yet at times overlapping, male same-sex sexual subcultures had emerged in the Pacific Northwest: one among the men and boys who toiled in the regions logging, fishing, mining, farming, and railroad-building industries; the other among the young urban white-collar workers of the emerging corporate order.
Donald Pisani's history of perhaps the boldest economic and social program ever undertaken in the United States--to reclaim and cultivate vast areas of previously unusable land across the country-shows in fascinating detail how ambitious government programs fall prey to the power of local interest groups and the federal system of governance itself.
This book chronicles the fascinating story of the enthusiastic, stalwart, and talented naturalists who were drawn to California's spectacular natural bounty over the decades from 1786, when the La Perouse Expedition arrived at Monterey, to the Death Valley expedition in 1890-91, the proclaimed "e;end"e; of the American frontier.
The history of the American West is a history of struggles over land, and none has inspired so much passion and misunderstanding as the conflict between ranchers and the federal government over public grazing lands.
