History of California

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 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.

In this episode, we look at a few versions of the myth of Joaquin Murrieta.

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.

A quick update on the podcast and plans for the new year.

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.

In this episode, we examine the contigencies of the formation of San Francisco.

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.

Please listen for the latest updates to the podcast.

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.

In this episode, we explore the mining communities of the Gold Rush.

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.' Our Patreon Page

In this episode, we explore the context and the issues surrounding California's first constitution. Our Patreon Page

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. Our Patreon Page

In this episode, we explore the history and techniques involved in mining gold in California. Our Patreon Page

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 Our Patreon Page

In this episode, we explore the role of immigration in the Gold Rush. Our Patreon Page

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. Support this program

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 Our Patreon Page

In this episode, we continue our discussion of the interim government of California. Please support us by leaving a rating and review or contributing financially through our Patreon Page.

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 Support the Podcast Our Patreon Page

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. Support Us Our Patreon Page

In this episode, we explore land rights and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

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 Support Us Our Patreon Page