History of California Podcast: Recent Episodes
Jordan Mattox
Today, we have Matthew Davenport on the show. Matthew is an attorney and the author of two books, the second of which, The Longest Minute: The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906 is the topic for today's conversation. Matthew's first book, First Over There, was a finalist for the 2015 Guggenheim Lehrman Prize in military history, and was heralded by Pulitzer Prize winning historian James McPherson as "military history at its best." The Longest Minute is a fascinating look at the conditions that led to this terrible fire that destroyed the city of San Francisco in 1906.
Matthew has been a contributing writer for the Wall Street Journal book review and Salon.com and is a member of the Authors Guild. He is a native Missourian and a former prosecutor and now practices law in North Carolina where he lives with his wife and two sons. This was a great conversation where we were able to dig into the earthquake, the subsequent fire and a lot more.
Buy Matthew's Books Here
Eric Porter is Professor of History, History of Consciousness, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz, where he is also affiliated with the Music and Latin American and Latina/o Studies departments. He previously taught in the American Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz as well as at the University of New Mexico and the University of Nevada, Reno. His research and teaching interests include Black cultural and intellectual history, US cultural history, jazz and improvisation studies, urban studies, and comparative ethnic studies. Among his previous books are two University of California Press publications: What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (2002), winner of an American Book Award, and, with the photographer Lewis Watts, New Orleans Suite: Music and Culture in Transition (2013). The subject of our conversation today is his new book, A People's History of SFO, which is a fascinating look at the complicated history of San Francisco's airport using an ethnic studies lens, an environmental lens, and a labor lens.
Buy Dr. Porter's Book Here
Today, we have Langdon Moss on the show. Langdon is hosting a great new podcast called The Savage West where he unravels the complex web of early western expansion, taking listeners beyond the basic narrative to expose the raw realities of America's savage origins. What truths lie beneath the legends of violence, greed, hope, and courage? What do the history books get right, and what ideas, events and people deserve re-examination? Through dynamic, unscripted episodes, Moss explores divergent perspectives to challenge what we thought we knew about our past, inviting listeners to question and re-examine the stories at the heart of American history. Langdon also worked as a research assistant for a past guest Dean King with his book on John Muir. It’s always great to talk with someone working in a similar space as myself and we can get into so much in this podcast. And Langdon even has a few questions for me as well. Please enjoy our conversation!
Link to The Savage West podcast
Dr. Natalia Molina is a Distinguished Professor and Dean’s Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Her influential research examines the interconnected histories of race, place, gender, culture, and citizenship. An award-winning author, teacher, and mentor, she has written three acclaimed books: How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts; Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940; and, most recently, A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community. The Los Angeles Times called A Place at the Nayarit an “essential Los Angeles book.” It was a finalist for a James Beard Award and received 14 awards and honorable mentions from various organizations. The book chronicles the lives of immigrant workers, including Molina’s grandmother, who became placemakers, nurturing and feeding their communities at restaurants that served as urban anchors.
Professor Molina is currently working on a new book, The Silent Hands that Shaped the Huntington Library: A History of Its Immigrant Workers. Named a USC 2023 Communicator of the Year, she has written for the LA Times, Washington Post, San Diego Union-Tribune, and elsewhere. In 2020, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Before we begin our next major thematic section of the podcast on railroads, we will be looking at the life of Leland Stanford who serves a bridge between the Gold Rush era, the Civil War Era in California government, and the Transcontinental Railroad.
Dorothy Lazard is an American writer, librarian, and public historian based in Northern California.
Her new book is What You Don't Know Will Make a Whole New World. Click here to buy it!
Dorothy grew up in the Bay Area of the 1960s and ’70s, surrounded by an expansive network of family, and hungry for knowledge. Here in her first book, she vividly tells the story of her journey to becoming “queen of my own nerdy domain.” Today Lazard is celebrated for her distinguished career as a librarian and public historian, and in these pages she connects her early intellectual pursuits—including a formative encounter with Alex Haley—to the career that made her a community pillar. As she traces her trajectory to adulthood, she also explores her personal experiences connected to the Summer of Love, the murder of Emmett Till, the flourishing of the Black Arts Movement, and the redevelopment of Oakland. As she writes with honesty about the tragedies she faced in her youth—including the loss of both parents—Lazard’s memoir remains triumphant, animated by curiosity, careful reflection, and deep enthusiasm for life.
Today we have Benno Herz on the program. Benno Herz was named Program Director at the Thomas Mann House, Los Angeles in spring 2022 and was previously Project Manager at the House. Prior to this, he studied theater, film, and media at Goethe University Frankfurt, where he completed his M.A. with a focus on digital aesthetics and interface theory. Since 2009, he has been creatively engaged in several music and film projects as a writer and instrumentalist.
Thomas Mann’s Los Angeles: Stories from Exile 1940–1952, edited by Nikolai Blaumer and Benno Herz / illustrations by Jon Stich, is an amazing collection of essays and illustrations discussing the contributions of the many emigres and exiles who made it to and contributed to Los Angeles in and around WWII.
Buy the book here
Thomas Mann House
Today, we have Randy Dotinga on the show. Randy has been a freelance writer since 1999 and specializes in health/medicine, politics, books, and the odd and unusual. We discuss the state of journalism, the many "San Diegos," the military industry, political history, the Mission period, the Civil War, graveyards, political scandals, and much more. Please enjoy our conversation.
Randy's Articles at the Voice of San Diego
Today we have Andrew Alden on the show. Alden is a geologist and geoscience writer who has worked for the US Geological Survey and reported for KQED and Bay Nature. Long fascinated with rocks and landscapes, Alden found inspiration for his debut book, Deep Oakland, in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which, as he writes, “ripped the city open and revealed to us its heart and character.” Through his writing Alden raises awareness for what he calls the deep present: the appreciation of the ancient underpinnings that shape the modern-day surroundings of daily life.
Deep Oakland: How Geology Shaped a City book link
In this final episode, we discuss the end of the Civil War, and I recommend some further reading.
Today, we have Mas Masumoto on the podcast. A farmer, writer, and a repository of memories of the valley, Mas is a central voice in the region. I am so excited to have him on the show to talk about farming, memory, writing, agrarian ideas, glyphosate, real estate development, tell intimate family stories, mental illness, pickled peaches, and much more. Please enjoy my conversation with Mas Masumoto.
In this episode, we discuss social and political patterns during the Civil War in California.
I have a special episode for you that I thought was lost. Sometimes when I record podcast episodes, audio files can get corrupted or go missing. This is one of those situations. But luckily, I was able to recover it.
Today, I have for you Maggie Paul. Maggie is the author of Scrimshaw, Borrowed World, and the chapbook Stones from the Baskets of Others. Her poetry reviews and interviews have appeared in the Catamaran Literary Reader, Rattle, the Monterey Poetry Review, Porter Gulch Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Frenzy, Salt, and others.
She is a poet and a nonfiction writer in Santa Cruz, California. Our focus in this conversation is twofold. First, we cover some of her famous conversation interviews with poets and writers from across California. We also discuss the history of California poetry. It was a wonderful conversation.
I know you'll love it. Let's go meet Maggie Paul.
In this episode, we continue our series by discussion the Long Walk of the Navajo people and its connection to the Greater Reconstruction.
Today we have Chris McGilvray on the show to talk about his new documentary film Eden, a beautiful story about the succession of a historic winery in the Santa Cruz mountains. Jeffrey and Ellie Patterson dedicated 40 years of their lives to Mount Eden vineyards and their children are wrestling with whether to carry on their family business or go off to pursue their paths away from the mountain.
The film “Eden” will premiere on March 9 at 4:30 p.m. as part of the San Jose Cinequest film festival at the historic California Theater. Tickets are available for $14 here. Following the screening, join the Pattersons and the filmmakers at a Mount Eden party happening at the nearby Westin Hotel. Tickets are available here for the after-party at $50 and include wine and appetizers. If you’d like to view a trailer of the film, click here. And here is a link to the film’s website for more information.
Today, we have Ann Wolfe on the show, the Nevada Museum of Art’s chief curator and associate director to discuss the new exhibition: Sagebrush and Solitude: Maynard Dixon in Nevada, which will be on display at the Nevada Museum of Art March 2 – July 28, 2024, and which is the first comprehensive exhibition to document Dixon’s early wanderings and extended visits to Nevada and the Eastern Sierra.
The exhibition is accompanied by the publication of a major 250+ page book co-published by Rizzoli and Electra in New York and the Nevada Museum of Art. Sagebrush and Solitude: Maynard Dixon in Nevada which is edited by Ann M Wolfe, our guest today. Please enjoy our conversation.
Link to the exhibition
Today we have Alexander Hamilton Cherin on the show. Cherin is an award-winning journalist whose work has been recognized by the Los Angeles Press Club where he was nominated as Journalist of the Year in 2020. A lawyer by training, his articles have appeared in the OC Weekly and Mr. Cherin has been a featured panelist on National news networks including CNN and Fox News. His new book is a fictional portrayal of an actual Radio contest in the 1980s in Los Angeles, with a hidden treasure and a cast of characters searching for the fortune for disparate but connected reasons. Please enjoy our conversation.
In this episode, we continue our story of California and the Civil War by introducing the major conflict in the southwestern theater: Union Forces and Indigenous Tribes.
Today, we have Dr. Andrew Shanken. Dr. Shanken is an architectural and urban historian with an interest in how cultural constructions of memory shape the built environment (and vice versa). He also works on the unbuilt and paper architecture, themed landscapes, heritage and conservation planning; traditions of representation in twentieth-century architecture and planning; keywords in architecture and American culture; and consumer culture and architecture. He is interested in historiography, particularly of architectural history, and the intersection of popular culture and architecture. Since this is too much for one person, he is looking to clone himself.
Professor Shanken’s first book, 194X, examines how American architects and planners on the American homefront anticipated the world after the war. Broadly speaking, it is a cultural history of American architecture, planning, and consumer culture in this formative and strained moment for the architectural profession. His second book, Into the Void Pacific, looks at the architecture of the neglected 1939 San Francisco world’s fair. His third book, The Everyday Life of Memorials came out from Zone Books in 2022.
He is currently the Director of American Studies, Faculty Curator of the Environmental Design Archives, on the Faculty Advisory Committee at the Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Global Urban Humanities. He has a joint appointment in American Studies. We dig into a lot in this conversation. If you like to think deeply about architecture and urban space, this is the episode for you. Please enjoy our conversation.
Today, we have Tom Moon on the show. Tom is the History and Culture Coordinator for In-N-Out and is known as In-N-Out Burger’s official historian. If you grew up in California like me, you likely have childhood memories of this California icon. This was such a fun conversation where we covered everything from the history, the birth of the secret menu, to employee development, the consistency of culture and branding and much more. Tom is such an amazing resource. Please enjoy our conversation.
Today, we have author and historian Ann Vileisis on the show. Ann is the author of a number of books and the focus of our conversation today is on her latest book Abalone: The Remarkable History and Uncertain Future of California's Iconic Shellfish, which came out in May 2020. The book is a wonderful history of this amazing shelled creature and the human relationship to its flourishing and potential peril.
Today, we have Dr. Patrick Allitt on the show. Dr. Allitt is the Cahoon Family Professor of American History and the Undergraduate Honors Coordinator at Emory University. He has a PhD from UC Berkeley and is the author of seven books, most recently A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism. He’s also the presenter of a number of lecture series through the Great Courses, one of which is titled The West, a focal point of this conversation. There’s a lot I’d admire in the work of Dr. Allitt, primarily among those being his ability to translate academic work to a broader audience, something that I am trying to do here with this podcast.
Today, we have two of the hosts of the amazing podcast Water Talk, one of my favorite podcasts on the internet that explores all things water, with emphasis on California Water issues, but also covering broader areas related to water. The first is Dr. Mallika Nocco. Mallika is an Assistant Professor in Cooperative Extension specializing in soil-plant-water relations and irrigation management and director of the Conservation Irrigation Lab at the University of California, Davis. We also have Dr. Samuel Sandoval. Samuel is an Associate Professor in Cooperative Extension and Water Resources Management at University of California, Davis. He has developed effective communication programs in English and Spanish for topics related to water and created virtual forums that foster communities of scientists for exchanging ideas, collaborative projects, fact checking and myth busters. We cover so much in this conversation and I know you will enjoy it.
We continue the story of California and the Civil War by discussing the fighting in the Southwest.
Today we have Sherry Monohan on the show. Sherry is a culinary historian who has written a wide variety of books including work on historical recipes, the history of Madams and brothels in California, an elegiac book about Pike’s Peak, the history of wine in California, and more. This conversation was such a fun conversation and is chocked full of lots of fun food conversation leading up to Thanksgiving.
Sherry's Website
Today we have an interview with Eric Nusbaum. The former sports editor at Vice, Nusbaum is now the editor-in-chief of Seattle Met. He is the author of Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between, which is the subject of our conversation. Please enjoy.
Today, we have Craig Walsh on the show. Walsh is the son of the legendary San Francisco 49ers head coach Bill Walsh and himself a former executive of the 49ers. He also co-authored the book The Score Takes Care of Itself, with his father and writer Steve Jamison, which crystallizes Bill Walsh’s principles of leadership. This was a fascinating conversation. Please enjoy.
Today, we have an interview with Kolin Perry about the new exhibit at Nevada Museum of Art called End of the Range: Charlotte Skinner in the Eastern Sierra.
Charlotte B. Skinner (1879-1963) was an artist and educator living in the Eastern Sierra of California from 1905 to 1933. Skinner counted herself among the artistic circles of renowned photographers and artists of the West. Her home became a retreat and a site of inspiration for these artists and others who were passing through Owens Valley seeking new subject matter and like-minded creatives. This exhibition features original paintings and drawings of the Eastern Sierra by Charlotte B. Skinner. It also includes works by artist-friends including Dorothea Lange, Maynard Dixon, Roi Partridge, Sonya Noskowiak, Ralph Stackpole, and William Wendt, along with Panamint Shoshone baskets from her own personal collection.
Kolin Perry is the curatorial assistant at the Nevada Museum of Art, where he has worked since 2022. Previously he worked at museums and art organizations on the east and west coasts. He received a bachelors in art history and photography, and a masters in art education from Lesley University. As a museum professional, Kolin is interested in exploring mindfulness-based stress reduction in museums and gallery settings.Kolin's recent research includes exploring queer semiotics in the 1970s Castro District, as well as Native American basket weaving practices in California.
Today, we have Paul Carter on the show. Carter is an attorney with more than twenty years of experience in investigation and trial work and the author of the new biography Richard Nixon: California's Native Son. Please enjoy our conversation
In this episode, we conclude our three part episode series on the life and art of Chiura Obata.
Today, we have an interview with Malcolm Harris. Harris is a writer, critic and journalist and the author of, among other books, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, which is the subject of today’s episode. Please enjoy this wide ranging conversation.
Today, we have Katherine Blunt on the program. Katherine is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and author of California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric and What it Means for America’s Power Grid. The book, a national bestseller, won the 2022 Golden Poppy award for nonfiction.
Her coverage of PG&E, a collaboration with two colleagues, was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and earned a Gerald Loeb award, the highest honor in business journalism.
Today we have Dr. James Zarsadiaz on the show. Dr Zarsadiaz is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program. He specializes in United States history, particularly urban and suburban history and Asian American history. Prof. Zarsadiaz was a fellow at both the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History and Asian Pacific American Center. The focus of our conversation is his new book Resisting Change in Suburbia: Asian Immigrants and Frontier Nostalgia in L.A. which is the 2023 recipient of the Organization of American Historians' Lawrence W. Levine Award. Please enjoy this fascinating conversation!
In this episode, we continue Obata's story as he journeys to Yosemite and ventures into the High Sierra.
Today we have Dr. Mitchell Schwarzer on the show. Dr. Schwarzer is a Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture at California College of the Arts, and a historian of architecture and urbanism. He has written books on architectural theory, visual perception, and the buildings of the San Francisco Bay Area. His most recent book and the subject of our conversation is Hella Town: Oakland’s History of Development and Disruption. In this podcast, we cover urban history and development, parks, the politics and economics of professional sports arenas, deindustrialization, and more. Please enjoy.
In today's episode, we meet Chiura Obata, learn about his early, his immigration to the United States, and set the stage for his career as one of the most famous artists in California History.
Today, we have Dr. Virginia Scharff on the show. Dr. Scharff is an emeritus professor of History from the University of the New Mexico and has written and edited many books about women and the west and curated many museum exhibits at the Autry. This is a wide-ranging conversation where we touch on many of her intellectual projects that cover a breath of topics. Please enjoy.
In this episode, we look at the fascinating life of Mary Ellen Pleasant, an African American woman who blazed trails in Californian politics.
Today, we have an interview with Dean King. King is an award-winning author of ten nonfiction books. Dean relishes the adventures involved in making history come to life while at the same time diligently searching out the truth and turning up new historical detail. The focus of our conversation is his newest book Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship That Saved Yosemite. Please enjoy this fascinating conversation.
In this episode, we continue our series by discussing Whigs and Republicans in California.
Today, we have Dr. Jenni Sorkin on the show. Dr. Sorkin is an Associate Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at UCSB. Dr. Sorkin writes on the intersections between gender, material culture, and contemporary art. Her most recent book is Art in California (2021), written for Thames & Hudson’s acclaimed World of Art series. As a state, California is the site of tremendous diversity in the visual arts and has been at the forefront of cultural production throughout the 20th century. We cover a broad range of topics in this conversation, and I honestly feel like the conversation could have been twice as long with all of the fascinating details and history in her book.
In this episode, we wrap the section on the Democratic Party in California in the 1850's.
Kim Bancroft earned a B.A. in English from Stanford, an M.A. in English and a teaching credential from San Francisco State University, and a doctorate in education from UC Berkeley. She has taught at high schools and community colleges in the Bay Area, at the Universidad de Guanajuato in Mexico, and at Sacramento State. In 2014 Kim edited the 1890 autobiography of her great-great-grandfather, Hubert Howe Bancroft, founder of the Bancroft Library at U.C. Berkeley. Her edited version was published by Heyday Books, titled Literary Industries: Chasing the Vanishing West. She also wrote a biography of the founder of Heyday Books, called The Heyday of Malcolm Margolin: The Damn Good Times of a Fiercely Independent Publisher. Her newest book is called Writing Themselves into History: Emily and Matilda Bancroft in Journals and Letters, which covers the literary lives of the two wives of H.H. Bancroft.
Donald Worster is one of the founders of, and leading figures in, the field of environmental history.Worster’s books include Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas; Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s; Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West; A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell; and A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir; along with several books of collected essays including The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination.
Today, we have Dr. Elliott West on the show. Dr. West received his B.A. from the University of Texas (1967) and his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado (1971). He joined the University of Arkansas faculty in 1979. Two of his books, Growing Up With the Country: Childhood on the Far-Western Frontier (1989) and The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains (1995) received the Western Heritage Award. The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (1998) received five awards including the Francis Parkman Prize and PEN Center Award. His most recent book is Continental Reckoning, which might be my favorite large survey of western history in print.
In the third episode in the series, we turn our focus to Democratic Party in California.
Today on the show we have Apsara DiQuinzio, the Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nevada Museum of Art, to discuss an amazing current exhibition about the artist Adaline Kent. Here’s the press release about this amazing exhibition: The Nevada Museum of Art will host the first retrospective exhibition of one of mid-century America’s most innovative and underrecognized artists to occur in nearly sixty years in Adaline Kent: The Click of Authenticity. The exhibition features approximately 120 works that span Kent’s entire career, and will be on display at the Museum from January 28, 2023 – September 10, 2023. The exhibition will occupy the entire second floor, charting major thematic developments in the artist’s work, which progressed from figuration to abstraction. Encompassing a diverse range of media, the exhibition includes drawings, original pictures incised on Hydrocal (a plaster mixture), sculptures both large and small, and a collection of terracottas — many of which have not been seen by the public in over half a century.
Our conversation will give you a broad overview of Kent’s biography, features and themes of her art, and how she speaks to our time.
In the second episode in this series, we wrap up our discussion of the Know Nothing party's influence in California.
Today, we have an interview with Dr. Joshua Paddison. Dr. Paddison teaches at Texas State San Marcus and is the author of, among other works, American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California, which is the focus of our conversation.
In this first episode in a three-part series, we will look politics in California by setting first some context before digging into the Know Nothing Party's heyday at the state level in California.
Glenna Matthews received her Ph.D. from Stanford University. Among her major publications are “Just a Housewife”: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America, The Rise of Public Woman: Woman’s Power and Woman’s Place, 1630–1970, and, most recently, The Golden State in the Civil War: Thomas Starr King, the Republican Party, and the Birth of Modern California, which is the focus of this conversation. She has been associate professor at Oklahoma State University and a visiting associate professor at Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley and at Los Angeles.
In this episode, we review the basic series of events and context of California's relationship to and involvement with the US Civil War in order to set forthcoming episodes on the topic.
Tom Chaffin was born and grew up in Atlanta and spent his early professional years in journalism, living in, among other places, Savannah, New York City, San Francisco, and Paris. Chaffin (M.A. American Studies, New York University, Ph. D. History, Emory University) has taught U.S. history and writing at various universities, and his articles, reviews and essays have appeared in various magazines and publications. He was a frequent contributor to the New York Times‘ acclaimed “Disunion” series on the American Civil War. In 2012, he was a Fulbright fellow in Ireland. The focus of our conversation is Chaffin’s book Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire. Please enjoy our conversation.
Tamara Venit Shelton is associate professor of history at Claremont McKenna College and author of Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors in the American Medical Marketplace and A Squatter’s Republic: Land and the Politics of Monopoly in California, 1850–1900.
In this final episode on the Guardian of Yosemite, we look at the end of Clark's life and his legacy.
Today, we have Dr. Ben Madley on the show. Benjamin Madley is a historian of Native America, the United States, and colonialism in world history. Born in Redding, California, he spent much of his childhood in Karuk Country near the Oregon border where he became interested in relations between colonizers and Indigenous people. Educated at Yale and Oxford, he writes about Native Americans as well as colonialism in Africa, Australia, and Europe, often applying a transnational and comparative approach. Yale University Press published his first book, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873. Madley is currently co-editing The Cambridge World History of Genocide, Volume 2: Genocide in the Indigenous, Early Modern, and Imperial Worlds, 1535-1914(forthcoming, 2023), with historians Ned Blackhawk, Ben Kiernan, and Rebe Taylor. His current research explores Native American migration and labor in the making of the United States. Please enjoy our conversation.
In this episode, we can continue to story of Galen Clark as he becomes Guardian of Yosemite and his family situation changes.
Today we have Kevin Waite on the show. Kevin Waite is an associate professor at Durham Universisty and a political historian of the 19th-century United States with a focus on slavery, imperialism, and the American West. His first book, West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire (UNC Press, 2021), is a study of slaveholding expansion in California and the Far Southwest. It explores how American Southerners extended their labour order and political vision across the continent, and in the process, triggered a series of conflicts that culminated in the Civil War. West of Slavery won the 2022 Wiley-Silver Prize from the Center for Civil War Research and was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize as well as the SHEAR Manuscript Prize. It was named one of the "11 books that shaped how we think about California" by Boom: A Journal of California and one of the "Five Best Books" ever written on the Civil War in the American Far West by the Civil War Monitor. Please enjoy our conversation.
Today, we have an interview with Boris Dralyuk. Dralyuk is a literary translator, poet, and the Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA, where he taught Russian literature for a number of years. He has also taught at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, London Review of Books, The Guardian, Granta, and other journals. He is the author of many books and is a wonderful translator and has won many prizes for his work. His new book is called My Hollywood and Other Poems, which was published early this year. It is a collection of lyric meditations on the experience of émigrés in Los Angeles. In forms ranging from ballades to villanelles to Onegin sonnets, the poems pursue the sublime in a tarnished landscape, seek continuity and mourn its loss in a town where change is the only constant. My Hollywood draws on the poet’s own life as a Jewish immigrant from the Soviet Union, honors the vanishing traces of the city’s past, and, in crisp and evocative translations, summons the voices of five Russian poets who spent their final years in LA, including the composer Vernon Duke. Our conversation here is focused around Russian history in Los Angeles, Russian immigration, the war in Ukraine, his time as an editor of the LA Review of books and more. Please enjoy our wonderful conversation and buy his equally wonderful new book.
In my first narrative podcast after a brief hiatus, we return with an episode about a little known progenitor and protector of one our national treasures.
Today, we have Dr. Andrea McDowell on the show. Professor McDowell is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School and holds a Ph.D. in Ancient History from the University of Pennsylvania. She is an expert on the legal and social history of Ancient Egypt; her many publications in that area include a book on Ancient Egyptian legal procedure as well as a more general work on Village Life in Ancient Egypt. Professor McDowell has taught Egyptology at Leiden, Oxford, and Johns Hopkins universities.In recent years, Professor McDowell has turned to American legal history.
She recently published a book called “We the Miners.” about Americans and self-government in the California gold rush Americans of the 19th century were not only skilled in self-organization but also enthusiastic about making their own rules. In the gold rush, the miners' meetings were the only government. Using parliamentary procedure, now known as Robert’s Rules of Order, the American miners adopted law codes, decided property disputes, and held criminal trials, even after the State of California established the official court system. McDowell is particularly interested in the dynamics of crowd and individual, including the openings for sober minded men, using parliamentary procedure, to take back the initiative from the loudest and angriest members of the crowd. She is equally interested in the failure of the same sober men to intervene when a subset of the population slaughtered Native Americans and expelled foreigners from the mines, even though at least some Americans strongly disapproved of what was happening. This book is the focus of our conversation and we explore many interesting topics along those lines and others.
Today, we have interview for you with Dr. John Mack Farager. An emeritus professor from Yale, Dr. Farager is the author of many books, but today we are focused on his most recent book California: An American History, which I think will become the popular history of California and I hope makes its way into classrooms across California.
Richard White is an historian of the United States specializing in the American West, the history of capitalism, environmental history, history and memory, and Native American history. His work has occasionally spilled over into Mexico, Canada, France, Australia and Ireland.
He is a MacArthur Fellow and a recipient of the Mellon Distinguished Professor Award. His work has won numerous academic prizes, and he has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
His new book is Who Murdered Jane Stanford? It’s a murder mysterey, a vivid picture of the gilded age, and a palace intrigue story written by an eminent historian.
Today, I have an interview for you with George Miles, curator of the Western American Collection at the Beinecke Library at Yale. We spend a lot of time talking with and about the work of historians, but ungirding that work is the work of librarians and archivists who diligently assemble collections that scholars can draw on to original research. Miles has a wealth of knowledge to share about the historiography of the west, the relationship between photography and the creation of the myth of the west, curating archives to be more inclusive, and much more.
In this episode, we begin a series on the Indian Wars that decimated the native population in the US and specifically California as well.
Albert L. Hurtado is retired as Professor and Paul H. and Doris Eaton Travis Chair of Modern American History at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of several books, including John Sutter: A Life on the North American Frontier.
Today, we have Dr. Stephen Aron on the program. He is the President and CEO of the Autry Autry Museum of the American West. Before that he was a professor in the history department at UCLA where he specialized in the history of frontiers, borderlands, and the American West.
In this second episode of the series, we continue our discussion of the artists of the Gold Rush.
Art of the Gold Rush by Janice T. Driesbach, Harvey L. Jones , Katherine Church Holland
In this first of a two part episode, we will explore some of the famous artists of the Gold Rush.
Today we have Dana Gioia on the show. Gioia is an internationally acclaimed poet and writer. Former California Poet laureate and Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia was born in Los Angeles of Italian and Mexican descent. The first person in his family to attend college, he received a B.A. and M.B.A. from Stanford and an M.A. from Harvard in Comparative Literature. For fifteen years he worked as a businessman before quitting at forty-one to become a full-time writer. We will be focusing on Gioia’s survey of California Poetry that was published in 2003. Please enjoy our winding and wide-ranging conversation on the history of poetry in California.
Today, we have an interview with Dr. Matt Seybold. Dr. Seybold is on the faculty Elmira College faculty and is the Editor-in-Chief of MarkTwainStudies.org. He earned his Ph.D. from University of California, Irvine in 2012, after which he worked at The University of Alabama. He teaches courses on all periods of American Literature, as well as interdisciplinary courses on mass media and economics. Today, we are going to talk about all things Mark Twain in California. Please enjoy our conversation.
Today, we have Jim Delgado on the show. As a maritime archaeologist who works around the globe, Jim has spent decades in the fascinating world of underwater exploration. From diving in the shallows to supervising some of the most cutting-edge modern expeditions that have spanned the seven seas, Jim is known as a respected, passionate leader who’s prime directive is helping keep maritime archaeology alive and accessible to everyone.
During his 44-year career, he has been privileged to host the popular television show The Sea Hunters for five years. He was Executive Director of the Vancouver Maritime Museum for 15 years, and was Executive Director and then President of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA) from 2006-2010, before beginning his tenure as Director of the Maritime Heritage Program for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries from 2010-2017. In May 2017, Jim became Senior Vice President of SEARCH, Inc. where he will continue to advance the discipline and bring more history and archaeology alive for scholars and the public alike. Jim is the author, co-author or editor of over 33 books as well as numerous articles and archaeological reports covering a wide range of subjects related to the histories of shipwrecks. I discovered him doing research on the Gold Rush in the bay area and was fascinated by his work. This conversation definitely wanders through Jim’s expertise and experience to fascinating places.
In the episode, we sketch a brief bio of the poet and writer Joaquin Miller and read some of his more famous poems.
In this episode, we interview the authors of We Are the Land: A History of Native California. Below are their bios and a link to the book:
Link to the book
William J. Bauer, Jr. is an enrolled citizen of the Round Valley Indian Tribes and Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Damon B. Akins is Associate Professor of History at Guilford College, in Greensboro, North Carolina, and a former high school teacher in Los Angeles.
Biography:
Dr Wald is an Associate Professor of English and Environmental Studies at University of Oregon and whose teaching and research focuses on relationship between race and the environment, immigration and citizenship, food studies, environmental justice, and nature in popular culture. Dr. Wald’s first book and the focus of today’s conversation is The Nature of California; Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl which focuses on the paradoxical ways that farmers and farmworkers in California have been represented from the 1930s to the start of the twenty-first century. It examines the ways that depictions of farming and farm labor have never just been about those who labor in the earth, but have also presented a site to think through national belonging. The book exposes the process by which some people come to be seen as legitimately “American” while others are named as aliens, suggesting the ways in which the categories of natural and unnatural structure the U.S. system of racial gate-keeping.'
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In this episode, we explore the context and the issues surrounding California's first constitution.
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Today we have an interview with Dr. Iris H. W. Engstrand. is a native Californian and indispensable historian of Southern California .
Engstrand’s academic honors include USD’s distinguished University Professorship; the Davies Award for Faculty Achievement; Awards of Merit from the San Diego, Southern California, and California Historical Societies, Western History Association, and Orange Coast College; fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, American Philosophical Society and Huntington Library; and the California Design Award in Historic Preservation.
She is a trustee of the San Diego Natural History Museum and the San Diego Maritime Museum, past president of the American Historical Association Pacific Coast Branch and of the Western History Association. Engstrand has lived and traveled extensively in Spain and Mexico and lectures widely in both English and Spanish. She has degrees in history, with maors and minors in the fields of California, Mexico, Latin America and the Spanish Southwest history, biology and Spanish
Engstrand has recently been awarded the prestigious medal of the Order of Isabel la Catolica (Isabel the Catholic -- ruler of Spain in 1492) by Juan Carlos, King of Spain, for outstanding contributions to the history of Spain in the Americas.
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In this episode, we explore the history and techniques involved in mining gold in California.
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Today, I am excited to bring you my conversation with H.W. Brands. Dr. Brands nearly needs no introduction. He is an American Historian that has written 30 books on a variety of topics throughout American history. His most recent book that came out last October is The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom. He’s also a professor of History at UT Austin. Today’s conversation covers everything from Mexican American War and Gold Rush to value of tech companies and venture capital and it all relates, I promise.
Links:
Dr. Brands Amazon Author Page
Angles of Repose Wallace Stegner
The Gates of the Alamo Steven Harrigan
Kevin Starr's Amazon Author Page
Bancroft Histories
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Today, we have an interview with Susan Lee Johnson. Susan Lee Johnson holds the inaugural Harry Reid Endowed Chair for the History of the Intermountain West. In 2020, Johnson was named President-Elect of the Western History Association.
A historian of western North America and its borderlands, Johnson specializes in the study of gender; of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity; and of desire and embodiment. Johnson works primarily in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but teaches and takes interest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well. Johnson’s scholarship has focused on relations of power in the North American West both as a place of lived experience and as an imagined space, exploring these themes in three book projects: Writing Kit Carson: Fallen Heroes in a Changing West (University of North Carolina Press 2020), Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (Norton 2000), and a new project, tentatively titled “The Trail the Slaves Made,” a place-based history of how the Santa Fe Trail connected slaveries and emancipations in nineteenth-century North America: chattel slavery and its demise in the East, and, in the West, captive-taking and coerced labor, which died a different death. Our conversation wandered the Gold Rush, to Kit Carson to favorite western films.
Links:
Susan's Faculty Page
Susan's Books
In this episode, we begin to discuss the Gold Rush and its predecessors.
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Today, we have an interview with Professor Matt O'Hara. Professor O'Hara teaches at UC Santa Cruz and is an expert on Colonial Mexican History.
Books
Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico by Ben Vinson III
The Woman on the Windowsill: A Tale of Mystery in Several Parts by Sylvia Sellers-García
Promiscuous Power: An Unorthodox History of New Spain by Martin Nesvig
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In this episode, we continue our discussion of the interim government of California.
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Today, we have the writer and historian Rob Fitts on the show. Rob is an expert on Japanese baseball and has written a great book on the first Japanese baseball club in the United States which was started in the early 20th century in Los Angeles. Enjoy this fun miscellaneous episode!
About Rob Fitts
His Website
Issei Baseball: The Story of the First Japanese American Ballplayers
Rob's Newest Book
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In this episode, we begin to look at the interim government of California before it was added to the United States as a state in 1850.
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Today we are focused on what happened to Native People in California during the three governments: Spanish, Mexican, and American, but specifically American. My guest today is Dr. Brendan Lindsay, professor of history at Sacramento State. His book Murder State is both haunting and important. Sometimes we need to stare into the darkness of the past.
Books
Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California
Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to California
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Today, we have an interview with Gary Young. Gary is an American poet, printer and book artist. In 2010, he was named the first ever Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County. He has written many collections of poetry and edited two collections which will be the focus of our interview: The Geography of Home: California's Poetry of Place and Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California.
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On today's episode, we bring the conflict in California to an end.
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In this episode, we go through some of the final battles in California during the Mexican American War.
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We have a few important announcements for you at the end of the year.
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Today, we have another interview episode for you with Professor Amy Greenberg. Professor Greenberg is the George Winfree Professor of American History Penn State and the author of A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico as well as her more recent book Lady First: The World of First Lady Sarah Polk. We focus in this conversation in setting the stage for the Mexican American War and talking about the consequences.
A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico: https://amzn.to/345Zx7o
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Support our podcast by buying some historical swag: teespring.com/history-of-california-podcast?pid=46
Also, support our podcast by purchasing a sophisticated coffee mug or a fashionable tote bag, perfect for lugging around heavy history books: teespring.com/new-history-of-cal…ornia-podc?pid=658
In today's episode, we explore the first few major battles in the Mexican American War in the Alta California theater.
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Follow us on Instagram: www.instagram.com/history_of_ca_podcast
If you'd like to subscribe to the new weekly newsletter, please follow this link: eepurl.com/haiCNX
Support our podcast by buying some historical swag: teespring.com/history-of-california-podcast?pid=46
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Today, we have a special interview episode with one of my favorite historians, Alan Taylor.
Taylor is an American historian specializing in early United States history. He is the author of a number of books about the colonial history of the United States, the American Revolution and the early American Republic. Since 1995, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes and the Bancroft Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award for non-fiction.
In this episode, we meet Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of Alta California.
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If you'd like to subscribe to the new weekly newsletter, please follow this link: eepurl.com/haiCNX
Support our podcast by buying some historical swag: teespring.com/history-of-california-podcast?pid=46
Also, support our podcast by purchasing a sophisticated coffee mug or a fashionable tote bag, perfect for lugging around heavy history books: teespring.com/new-history-of-cal…ornia-podc?pid=658