The city of Salinas, nestled in a Central California valley of the same name, is best known as the childhood home of John Steinbeck and the source of inspiration for much of his work, including East of Eden. Readers of Steinbeck and students of California rural history will recognize the diverse agricultural community presented in Carol Lynn McKibben’s meticulously and deeply researched new book, Salinas: A History of Race and Resilience in an Agricultural City.
McKibben provides an exhaustive account of city building in Salinas, a place typically associated with farming. Nonetheless, as Richard C. Wade’s “spearhead thesis” taught us more than seventy years ago, the American West—including California—has always been urban. Indeed, the West was the most urban part of the country in the nineteenth century, in terms of the percentage of population living in cities. But while histories of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and other...
University of California Press