• Includes 30 essays by leading scholars in the field
• Essays range widely across perspectives, including political, social, economic, and environmental history
• Essays with similar approaches are paired and grouped to work as individual pieces and as companions to each other throughout the text
• Produced in association with the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West

William Deverell is Professor of History at the University of Southern California and Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. He is the author of numerous publications including Land of Sunshine: The Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles (with Greg Hise, 2005) and A Companion to Los Angeles (with Greg Hise, 2010). 

David Igler is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, where he teaches courses in U.S., environmental, and California history.  He is the author of The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (2013), and Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920 (2001).

List of Figures viii

Notes on Contributors ix

Introduction xiii

Part I Introductory Essays 1

1. Beyond Dreams and Disappointments: Defining California through Culture 3
James Quay

2. Rereading, Misreading, and Redeeming the Golden State: Defining California through History 22
D. J. Waldie

3. I Thought California Would Be Different: Defining California through Visual Culture 40
Catherine Gudis

4. At the Crossroads: Defi ning California through the Global Economy 75
Richard A. Walker

Part II Early California 97

5. Junípero Serra across the Generations 99
Steven W. Hackel

6. Alta California, the Pacifi c, and International Commerce before the Gold Rush 116
David Igler

7. Licit and Illicit Unions: Engendering Mexican Society 127
Rosamaría Toruño Tanghetti

8. Race and Immigration in the Nineteenth Century 145
Omar Valerio-Jiménez

Part III Conquest and Statehood 159

9. The 1850s 161
William Deverell

10. Nature and Conquest: After the Deluge of ’49 175
Douglas Cazaux Sackman

11. Native Californians in the Nineteenth Century 192
William Bauer, Jr.

12. Transformations in Late Nineteenth-century Rural California 215
David Vaught

13. Transnational Commercial Orbits 230
Robert Chao Romero

14. Reconsidering Conservation 246
Benjamin Heber Johnson

15. Religion in the Early Twentieth Century 262
Darren Dochuk

16. Immigration, Race, and the Progressives 278
Lon Kurashige

17. New Deal, No Deal: The 1930s 292
Rick Wartzman

Part IV Modern California 309

18. World War II 311
Arthur Verge

19. Between Liberation and Oppression: Gay Politics and Identity 322
Daniel Hurewitz

20. Making Multiculturalism: Immigration, Race, and the Twentieth Century 339
Kevin Allen Leonard

21. The Long 1950s 358
Shana Bernstein

22. Apportionment Politics, 1920–70 375
Douglas Smith

23. Under the Warm California Sun: Youth Culture in the Postwar Decades 391
Kirse Granat May

24. At the Center of Indian Country 405
Nicolas G. Rosenthal

25. Sexual Revolutions and Sexual Politics 416
Josh Sides

26. A Generation of Leaders, but Not in the Fields: The Legacy of Cesar Chavez 428
Miriam Pawel

27. Hollywood Changes its Script 443
John Horn

Part V California Prospects in the Twenty-first Century 453

28. Immigration and Race in the Twenty-first Century 455
Bill Ong Hing

29. Political Prospects in the Twenty-first Century 472
Raphael J. Sonenshein

30. Environmental Prospects in the Twenty-first Century 483
Jon Christensen

Index 499