What keeps Chinatown alive? In this episode of The History of California Podcast, host Jordan Mattox speaks with Dr. Laureen Hom, author of The Power of Chinatown: Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles, about the long history—and ongoing political significance—of Chinatowns in California. Drawing on her research in Los Angeles Chinatown, Dr. Hom explains how Chinatowns have been shaped by racial exclusion, urban violence, redevelopment, immigration policy, and suburbanization, while also serving as sites of community formation, political organizing, and resistance. The conversation explores how the concept of gentrification has evolved, why displacement is often indirect and difficult to see, and how cities deploy tools like redevelopment agencies, multicultural planning, and business improvement districts to reshape ethnic neighborhoods. Mattox and Hom also examine Chinatown’s changing demographics, its relationship to suburban Chinese communities in places like the San Gabriel Valley, and the challenges of coalition-building in multiracial neighborhoods where Chinese American and Latino residents share space, history, and vulnerability. This episode offers a powerful framework for understanding Chinatown not as a static cultural enclave, but as a dynamic political space—one that reveals broader truths about California’s urban history, community power, and the ongoing struggle for spatial justice.

In this episode, host Jordan Mattox sits down with Dr. Michael Zeitler for an expansive conversation about John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat — its mythic structure, its treatment of poverty, the nature of friendship and communal codes, and how Steinbeck used the Monterey landscape to explore deep questions about history and identity. Together they examine the novel’s tragic undercurrents, its echoes of World War I trauma, its links to Mice and Men, Grapes of Wrath, In Dubious Battle, and Cannery Row, and why Steinbeck’s early works continue to provoke debate about caricature, class, and representation. Dr. Zeitler also reflects on Hardy, Haney’s Beowulf, the anthropology of place, car mechanics in Steinbeck, and the philosophical lineage running from Emerson to Ellison. A wide-ranging, insightful discussion for Steinbeck fans and California history enthusiasts alike.

In this episode of The History of California Podcast, host Jordan Mattox sits down with attorney, author, and Yurok Tribe member Amy Bowers Cordalis for an intimate conversation about her new book The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family’s Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life. Amy shares the story of her family's deep roots along the Klamath River, the Yurok creation narrative that shapes their worldview, and the tribe’s intergenerational struggle to protect salmon and restore ecological balance. Together, Jordan and Amy explore the 2002 Klamath fish kill, the complex legal fight for dam removal, the importance of myth and cultural continuity, and the profound moment the river flowed freely once again. Throughout the episode, they examine Indigenous stewardship, the legacy of genocide, the nature of environmental restoration, and how the story of the Klamath fits into the larger arc of California’s history.

In this episode of The History of California Podcast, host Jordan Mattox speaks with author John Doll about his historical novel St. James Park and the real events behind one of California’s most shocking forgotten crimes: the 1933 lynching of two men accused of kidnapping Brooke Hart. Drawing on Doll’s personal memories of San Jose, his research into the city’s past, and his reflections on writing historical fiction, the conversation explores the transformation of Santa Clara Valley from orchards to tract homes, the complicated legacy of Bay Area redevelopment, and the political corruption that shaped early 20th-century San Jose. The episode also examines the vibrant immigrant cultures of the Valley, the brutal working conditions in the region’s canneries, the symbolic importance of St. James Park, and the unexpected presence of vigilante justice in California’s past. Doll discusses the limits of historical documentation, the power of fiction to fill silences in the record, and how family memory informed his portrayal of the Hart case. The conversation concludes with a reflection on California’s broader history—from lynching and racism to redevelopment, industrialization, and the myths we tell about the Golden State—plus Doll’s recommendations for essential reading on San Jose and its overlooked past. Purchase the book here

In this episode, we return to our ongoing narrative on Chinese immigration to California, examining the pivotal economic role Chinese immigrants played in shaping the state during the 19th century. From manufacturing and textiles to mining, service labor, and large-scale industrial work, Chinese labor was central to California’s development. We look closely at the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, where Chinese workers carried out some of the most perilous tasks in the Sierra Nevada—carving tunnels through granite, enduring brutal winters, and risking (and often losing) their lives to push the railroad forward. Despite their contributions, Chinese immigrants faced widespread discrimination, wage suppression, and hostility from organized labor and white settlers who viewed them as economic threats during downturns. We also explore the 1867 railroad strike, one of the largest labor actions of its time, revealing how Chinese workers challenged racist stereotypes that portrayed them as passive or submissive. Their collective resistance reshaped public perception and helped redefine Chinese identity in America. This episode sets the stage for the rising anti-Chinese sentiment that would lead to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—one of the most consequential immigration laws in U.S. history.

In this episode, host Jordan Mattox speaks with Dr. Jennifer Holland, author of Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement, about how the politics of abortion took root and evolved in the American West. Holland traces the movement’s origins from 19th-century medical debates to the late 20th century’s culture wars, exploring the intersections of religion, gender, race, and regional identity. She discusses the unique dynamics among Catholics, evangelicals, and Latter-Day Saints, the rise of crisis pregnancy centers, and the influential role of figures like James Dobson and organizations such as Focus on the Family. The conversation also examines California’s complex role—as both a progressive symbol and a conservative incubator—and how Western ideas of individualism, faith, and family helped shape national abortion politics. Buy Dr. Holland's Book Here

Host Jordan Mattox sits down with novelist Shelley Blanton-Stroud for a wide-ranging conversation about Bakersfield, historical fiction, and the hidden corners of California’s past. They begin with stories of growing up in the Central Valley—the stereotypes outsiders project, the Bakersfield Sound, Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace, and family traditions rooted in Dust Bowl migration. The conversation turns to Shelley’s work as a novelist. She explains the creative tension between history and fiction, the challenge of recreating the mental worlds of past characters, and how she used the erased record of the 1945 San Francisco “peace riots” as the foundation for her new novel An Unlikely Prospect. The episode also looks ahead to Shelley’s next project on Earl Warren, Bakersfield’s most famous son, whose father’s unsolved murder left a lasting imprint on his career and California history. Buy Shelley's Book Here

In this episode of The History of California Podcast, host Jordan Mattox discusses Captain of Her Soul: The Life of Marion Davies by Lara Gabrielle, the definitive biography of film star Marion Davies. Long overshadowed by her relationship with William Randolph Hearst and the gossip that surrounded her, Davies’s true story reveals a woman of independence, resilience, and remarkable talent. Drawing on unprecedented archival research, Gabrielle shows how Davies overcame disability and social stigma to become one of Hollywood’s leading comediennes and a devoted philanthropist. This episode shines a light on a complex figure who lived life on her own terms and declared herself “the captain of her soul.”4

On this episode, Jordan Mattox is joined by journalist and author Catherine Nichols to dive into the wild and little-known true story behind her book Deep Water. The book traces the rise and fall of a sophisticated drug smuggling ring started by a group of high school swim team surfers on the island of Coronado in Southern California. Their story, filled with risk, betrayal, and ambition, opens up unexpected windows into California's social history, coastal culture, and global connections. They explore the deeper historical context of the 1970s and 1980s in California—from the beaches of Coronado to broader themes of youth rebellion, military secrecy, and underground economies.

In this episode of The History of California Podcast, host Jordan Mattox sits down with author Taylor Kiland to discuss her new book, Murder of the Jujube Candy Heiress: A Coronado Cold Case. Set on the idyllic Coronado Island, the book reinvestigates the unsolved murder of a young heiress, Ruth Quinn, of the Jujube Candy fortune. Kiland shares how she unearthed records, reexamined the evidence, and conducted revealing interviews in an effort to shine a light on a case that still needs a resolution. 

In this episode of the History of California Podcast, host Jordan Mattox welcomes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Michael Hiltzik. Hiltzik is the author of Golden State: The Making of California, a fascinating survey of California’s history in the tradition of Kevin Starr’s acclaimed work. As a columnist and reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Hiltzik has written extensively about California’s political, economic, and cultural landscape, as well as authoring several books on the state’s history. Enjoy this fun and wide-ranging conversation exploring the forces that shaped the Golden State and the insights behind Hiltzik’s compelling storytelling.

Today’s episode is the second part of a two-episode series on John Steinbeck’s novel To a God Unknown. I wanted to do two episodes on this because the novel is fascinating, complex, and at times mystifying—and I wanted to get a few different perspectives to better understand it. Today’s guest is Dr. Michael Boyden, a professor in both the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures as well as the Institute for Culture and History. His primary interest is in American literature, with a special focus on ecocriticism, Anthropocene studies, and critical sustainability studies. I read a fascinating article he published on To a God Unknown, which examines the novel from an ecological perspective, and I was eager to talk with him about it. We cover a lot of ground—some topics echo my first conversation with Dr. Rivers—but we dive deeper into the ecological dimensions this time around.

Today we're continuing our series on John Steinbeck. This year, we've been reading through all of Steinbeck's major works. We started with The Pastures of Heaven, and To a God Unknown is the second book in the series. We’ll be doing two podcast episodes on this novel for a couple of different reasons. First and foremost, it’s probably the strangest, most confusing, and most exploratory of Steinbeck’s works. I wanted to get a few different perspectives on the meaning of this book—the characters, the plot, the context, and some of the major themes. Our first guest is Dr. Daniel Rivers. Dr. Rivers is an associate professor of American Studies and Literature at San Jose State University and also serves as the director of the Martha Heesley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State. We had a great conversation. We talked about a lot of things, including Dr. Rivers’s own research and writing on this book. There’s a lot to learn from this discussion, and I know you'll enjoy it.

Today, we have Elaine Chukan Brown on the show. Brown is a writer, speaker, and global wine educator. Brown is the Napa Valley specialist for Wine Enthusiast and previously served as the Executive Editor US for JancisRobinson.com, a columnist for Decanter magazine, and a contributing writer to Wine & Spirits magazine. They contributed to both the fourth and fifth editions of the Oxford Companion to Wine, the eighth edition of the World Atlas of Wine, and the compendiums On Burgundy and On California from Académie du Vin Library. Indigenous (Inupiaq and Unangan-Sugpiaq) from what is now Alaska, Brown has dedicated their career to the intersection of sustainability, climate action, and reducing gatekeeping in the wine industry. They co-founded the Diversity in Wine Leadership Forum and have advised diversity initiatives in multiple countries. Brown serves as a judge for the Texsom Awards, head judge for the 67 Pall Mall Communicator Awards, and is a board member of the Wine Writer Symposium. Their new book is The Wines of California. Here’s a description of the book and click here to buy it:  A concise, complete, smartly delivered and cohesive book for serious readers and students of wine. Focusing on the world’s fourth largest producer of wine – California – the book takes readers on a journey through the Golden State’s wines, paying due attention to famous wine destinations such as Sonoma and Napa as well as introducing readers to exciting lesser-known regions to explore. The book is divided into three major sections. The first looks at California wine in the context of the history of the state as a whole. It addresses key issues in California wine growing such as Indigenous Peoples and land ownership, immigration and labour issues, the back-to-the land movement, environmental protest and innovations in sustainability. The second section takes each major region in turn and looks into its history, growing conditions and varieties, as well as discussing the most significant and interesting producers. A final section looks at current themes in Californian wine and discusses the future of the industry across the state.

Today, we have Dr. James Buckley on the show. Dr. Buckley is an Associate Professor and Venerable Chair in Historic Preservation and the Director of the Historic Preservation Program at the University of Oregon, Portland. He has over twenty-five years of experience in the development of affordable housing in the Bay Area, including the adaptive reuse of several historic buildings for residential uses. Dr. Buckley previously taught at MIT and UC Berkeley and holds a Master’s degree in city planning and a Ph.D. in architectural history from UC Berkeley. He has been a member of the board of directors for the Vernacular Architecture Forum (VAF) and the Society of American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH). City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry Dr. James Buckley Here’s a description:  California’s 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the “instant city” of San Francisco as a base to exploit the rich natural resources of the American West. City of Wood examines how capitalists and workers logged the state’s vast redwood forests to create the financial capital and construction materials needed to build the regional metropolis of San Francisco. Architectural historian James Michael Buckley investigates the remote forest and its urban core as two poles of a regional “city.” This city consisted of a far-reaching network of spaces, produced as company owners and workers arrayed men and machines to extract resources and create human commodities from the region’s rich natural environment. Combining labor, urban, industrial, and social history, City of Wood employs a variety of sources—including contemporary newspaper articles, novels, and photographs—to explore the architectural landscape of lumber, from backwoods logging camps and company towns in the woods to busy lumber docks and the homes of workers and owners in San Francisco. By imagining the redwood lumber industry as a single community spread across multiple sites—a “City of Wood”—Buckley demonstrates how capitalist resource extraction links different places along the production value chain. The result is a paradigm shift in architectural history that focuses not just on the evolution of individual building design across time, but also on economic connections that link the center and periphery across space.

Tony Platt is the author of thirteen books and 150 essays and articles on race, inequality, and social justice in American history, among them Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States; Bloodlines: Recovering Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, from Patton’s Trophy to Public Memorial; and The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency. His work has been translated into German, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. In addition to scholarly books and publications, Platt has written for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Truthdig, History News Network, Z Magazine, Nation, Salon, Monthly Review, and the Guardian, and his commentaries have aired on National Public Radio. Now a Distinguished Affiliated Scholar at Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society, Platt taught at the University of Chicago, the University of California, Berkeley, and California State University where he received awards for teaching and scholarship. The focus of our conversation is Tony's new book The Scandal of Cal: Land Grabs, White Supremacy, and Miseducation at UC Berkeley.  Here's a description of the book:  The University of California, Berkeley—widely known as “Cal”—is admired worldwide as a bastion of innovation and a hub for progressive thought. Far less known are the university’s roots in plunder, warfare, and the promotion of white supremacy. As Tony Platt shows in The Scandal of Cal, these original sins sit at the center of UC Berkeley’s history. Platt looks unflinchingly at the university’s desecration of graves and large-scale hoarding of Indigenous remains. He tracks its role in developing the racist pseudoscience of eugenics in the early twentieth century. He sheds light on the school’s complicity with the military-industrial complex and its incubation of unprecedented violence through the Manhattan Project. And he underscores its deliberate and continued evasions about its own wrongdoings, which echo in the institution’s decision-making up to the present day. This book, above all, illuminates Cal’s culpability in some of the cruelest chapters of US history and sounds a clarion call for the university to undertake a thorough and earnest reckoning with its past. It is required reading for Cal alumni, students, faculty, and staff, and for anyone concerned with the impact of higher education in the United States and beyond.  

Today's episode is the first in a series of episodes on the history of Chinese Americans in California. We are beginning the series by discussing push and pull factors, immigration and legal status, mutual aid organizations, and more. 

Today, we have Gary Krist on the show. Gary has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Esquire, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He is the bestselling author of the acclaimed narrative nonfiction books The Mirage Factory, Empire of Sin, City of Scoundrels, and The White Cascade.  He has also written five works of fiction. Krist has received the Stephen Crane Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Public Scholar fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Lowell Thomas Gold Medal for Travel Journalism, and other awards. The subject of today’s episode is Gary’s new book Trespassers at the Golden Gate: A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco.    Here’s the description of the book:  Shortly before dusk on November 3, 1870, just as the ferryboat El Capitan was pulling away from its slip into San Francisco Bay, a woman clad in black emerged from the shadows and strode across the crowded deck. Reaching under her veil, she drew a small pistol and aimed it directly at a well-dressed man sitting quietly with his wife and children. The woman fired a single bullet into his chest. “I did it and I don’t deny it,” she said when arrested shortly thereafter. “He ruined both myself and my daughter.” Though little remembered today, the trial of Laura D. Fair for the murder of her lover, A. P. Crittenden, made headlines nationwide. As bestselling author Gary Krist reveals, the operatic facts of the case—a woman strung along for years by a two-timing man, killing him in an alleged fit of madness—challenged an American populace still searching for moral consensus after the Civil War. The trial shone an early and uncomfortable spotlight on social issues like the role of women, the sanctity of the family, and the range of acceptable expressions of gender, while jolting the still-adolescent metropolis of 1870s San Francisco, a city eager to shed its rough-and-tumble Gold Rush-era reputation. Trespassers at the Golden Gate brings readers inside the untamed frontier town, a place where—for a brief period—otherwise marginalized communities found unique opportunities. Readers meet a secretly wealthy Black housekeeper, an enterprising Chinese brothel madam, and a French rabble-rouser who refused to dress in sufficiently “feminine” clothing—as well as familiar figures like Mark Twain and Susan B. Anthony, who become swept up in the drama of the Laura Fair affair.  Krist, who previously brought New Orleans to vivid life in Empire of Sin and Chicago in City of Scoundrels, recounts this astonishing story and its surprisingly modern echoes in a rollicking narrative that probes what it all meant—both for a nation still scarred by war and for a city eager for the world stage.

Jack Gedney is the author of The Private Lives of Public Birds: Learning to Listen to the Birds Where We Live and a compact field guide to the trees of the San Francisco Bay Area. Since 2018, he has written a column on local birds, “On the Wing,” for the Marin Independent Journal. Jack currently co-owns a wild bird feeding and nature shop in Novato, California. The focus of our conversation today is Jack's new book The Birds in the Oaks: Secret Voices of the Western Woods which his wife Angelina beautifully illustrated. Here’s a description of the book:  The first book on the birds of California’s oaks, from our most lyrical and observant wanderer of the woods. With charm and delight, The Birds in the Oaks introduces us to the birds who burrow, forage, and soar among California’s keystone trees. The mighty oak hosts a multitude of avian denizens—from canopy hoppers to ground nesters to short-billed surface pluckers—who rely on the trees’ well-stocked pantry of acorns, insects, and flowers for sustenance and shelter. Spunky kinglets, crimson-eyed towhees, cuddle-craving bushtits, intrepid nuthatches, and impudent wrens are among the many memorable cast members in this pageant of oak-allied birds. Jack Gedney lyrically conveys the beautiful, comic, and endearing qualities of over fifteen bird species, each profile paired with an illustration by Angelina Gedney. His bird-filled tales of adaptation, ingenuity, and sheer persistence also bring to light the warp and weft of cross-species interdependence. The Birds in the Oaks reveals to us the utter joy of birds, the superabundant world of the oaks, and the innumerable interconnections these living beings create. Buy the book here

 Today we have Dr. William Deverell on the show. Dr. Deverell is a professor of History, Spatial Sciences, and Environmental Studies at USC. He's an American historian with a focus on the 19th and 20th century American West. He has written works on political, social, ethnic, and environmental history, and is the founding director of the Huntington USC Institute on California and the West. This was so much fun to record. Bill has written books across an array of areas and subjects. We just had a great time exploring different facets of California history. We cover a broad range of subjects. We do spend time on his most recent book on Kathy Fiscus, which is a fascinating story about reality television and its origins, but, more broadly, this is a podcast about California history at large, and there's a lot to be learned through this conversation. Buy William Deverell's New Book Here