On July 23, 1967, the eyes of the world fixed on Detroit, as thousands took to the streets to vent their frustrations with white racism, police brutality, and vanishing job prospects in the place that gave rise to the American Dream.
In 1980, the celebrated new wave band Blondie headed to Los Angeles to record a new album and along with it, the cover song ';The Tide Is High,' originally written by Jamaican legend John Holt.
With a uniquely balanced combination of salty, sweet, sour, and spicy flavors, Thai food burst onto Los Angeles's and America's culinary scene in the 1980s.
There are few places where mobility has shaped identity as widely as the American West, but some locations and populations sit at its major crossroads, maintaining control over place and mobility, labor and race.
Braided Waters sheds new light on the relationship between environment and society by charting the history of Hawaii's Molokai island over a thousand-year period of repeated settlement.
The Life of Paper offers a wholly original and inspiring analysis of how people facing systematic social dismantling have engaged letter correspondence to remake themselvesfrom bodily integrity to subjectivity and collective and spiritual being.
The Other California is the story of working-class communities and how they constituted the racially and ethnically diverse landscape of Baja California.
Point Reyes National Seashore has a long history as a working landscape, with dairy and beef ranching, fishing, and oyster farming; yet, since 1962 it has also been managed as a National Seashore.
In this first comprehensive authorized biography of David Brower, a dynamic leader in the environmental movement over the last half of the twentieth century, Tom Turner explores Brower's impact on the movement from its beginnings until his death in 2000.
How could Northern California, the wealthiest and most politically progressive region in the United States, become one of the earliest epicenters of the foreclosure crisis?
The tragic and mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths of Elizabeth Short, or the Black Dahlia, and Marilyn Monroe ripped open Hollywood's glitzy faade, exposing the citys ugly underbelly of corruption, crime, and murder.
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?
