Uneasily situated between counterculture images projected by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and the dawning of the “Age of Aquarius” a decade later, there emerged a motion picture interlude of innocence on the beaches of Southern California. It was fostered by Gidget (1959) and then thirty “surf and sex” movies that focused on young, attractive bodies and beach escapades rather than serious social causes.The films, argues Kirse May, “created an ideal teenage existence, marked by consumption, leisure, and little else.” Stephen Tropiano explains how their popularity helped shape “the archetypal image of the American teenager” and, reinforced by the surfin' sounds of Jan and Dean, the Beach Boys, and other recording groups, “turned America's attention to the Southern California coastline,” where “those who never set foot on its sandy shores were led to believe that life on the West Coast was a twenty-four-hour beach party.” This study examines a notable film of this genre to determine how musclemen were exploited to exhibit this playful spirit and how their negative reception reinforced an existing disregard toward physical culture. Muscle Beach Party illustrates how physical culture served other agendas, namely the need to address American fears of juvenile delinquency and to revive sagging box-office receipts within the guise of the “good life” of California.

This essay examines how maps created by Latina/o youth created “ephemeral forums,” improvised ad hoc spaces that served as music venues in 1990s South Los Angeles. The maps included on “Rock en Español ” event flyers demonstrate how Latinx youth envisioned Los Angeles and proclaimed their sense of place in the metropolis at a moment of social and demographic transformation. These maps help us understand how they and other Californians of color create and claim belonging,both past and present.

Although it was admitted to the Union as a free state in 1850, labor-starved gold-rush California permitted employers to bind Native Americans as unfree leased convicts, minor custodial wards, debt peons, and, between 1860 and 1863, indentured servants or “apprentices.” As a key component of California's elaborate system of unfree Native American labor, Indian apprenticeship flourished for three years until its abolition during the Civil War in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation. Little remembered today, much remains obscure regarding the essential details of Indian apprenticeship and the illegal slave trade that emerged to supply the considerable market demand for bound labor. This essay focuses on Humboldt County in northwestern California, where significant numbers of white residents made extensive use of Native American apprentices at the same time that many of their neighbors demanded—and began carrying out—the forced removal and outright extermination of local Indian peoples. Building on valuable data that the anthropologist Robert Heizer extracted in 1971 from the unique but now missing cache of over a hundred surviving indentures discovered in 1915 by the historian Owen C. Coy, this study offers two detailed group profiles of Humboldt County's white employers and their legally bound Native American workers. These collective portraits reveal the social, economic, and demographic compositions of frontier California's master and servant classes while simultaneously tracing both the rise and the fall of Indian apprenticeship within the violent racial context of Humboldt County during the gold rush and the Civil War.

When introduced in the nineteenth century, railroads were one of humankind's most transformational technologies. Like similar transformations such as the printing press and the automobile, railroads did more than advance technology. They fundamentally altered the entire social and cultural fabric, including basic relationships between people and time, distance, geography, class, and gender. Railroads also introduced new types of crime and criminal organization to the nineteenth-century West, and indeed to the entire nation and globe. These criminal activities quickly spread across wide geographic expanses. Railroads and society at large responded by altering the measures of social control through new forms of law enforcement, only one of which was the creation of private railroad-company police forces. In our own era, similar revolutionary information and communications technologies erupted upon a cultural and institutional world woefully unprepared to deal with them. As was true for nineteenth-century railroading, the results today have been new, ever-evolving forms of crime that plague individuals, companies, institutions, and governments, while baffling ill-equipped law enforcement agencies. The internet spammers, hackers, phishers, stalkers, swindlers, pedophiles, money launderers, identity thieves, election fixers, and cyberterrorists of today share a lineage with the railroad pickpockets, arsonists, ticket forgers, train robbers and wreckers, and hatchet-wielding hoboes of yesterday. Examining the railroads' transformation of crime and violence can shed light on today's tribulations with information technology, as well as on possible ways to deal with them.

This article examines four decades of anti-Japanese paranoia in popular American media, particularly in California, from the early 1900s to the eve of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. It illustrates the overlooked influence that this hysteria had in shaping American perceptions of Japanese immigrants in Baja California, Mexico, and the consequences of those views for these borderlands prior to 1941. Drawing on California and U.S. national newspapers, contemporary novels, and U.S. government records, the article shows that the presence of Japanese immigrants in Baja California was for decades used as a pretense by American interest groups seeking to annex the peninsula. Beneath these alleged security concerns were strong economic interests, among which obtaining sole control over the Colorado River figured prominently. Decades of annexation calls based on a supposed Japanese threat, this article argues, influenced the Mexican government's 1942 decision to place its citizens of Japanese descent in internment camps.

This essay charts a history of black liberation and complicity in the struggle for economic advancement at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) from the late 1950s into the 1980s. Joining scholars who have explored commercial aviation as a site of black mobility and immobility as well as those who have theorized Black Power's intersections with municipal policymaking, labor organizing, business and community development projects, and affirmative action programs, I examine the spheres of airport employment and entrepreneurialism to show how struggles to overcome social and spatial confinement in the Bay Area were often shaped by the entanglements of heterogeneous actors and systems. Indeed, such efforts at SFO responded to and were made possible by shifting interfaces of public and private capital investment; government action and inaction; the work of local and national networks of business elites, labor organizers, and activists; the efforts of individual black people to make their lives better; and a concomitant symbolic economy regarding the black presence in the Bay Area. As this story concludes in the 1980s, it demonstrates that despite some successes, such struggles had advanced in the Bay Area only so far as offering a precarious and patchy inclusion: a kind of holding pattern characterized by piecemeal professional integration and the more widespread consignment of black men and women to low-wage, low-skilled work, intermittent employment, and unemployment.

The federal art programs of the New Deal produced public art in quantities not seen before or since. Historians have studied many aspects of the New Deal's art programs, but few have considered the long-term history of works produced by them. New Deal art programs produced large numbers of public murals—so many that such murals are often thought of as the typical form of New Deal art. They thus provide readily available examples of the long-term experience of New Deal art. San Francisco has a particularly rich collection of these murals. Some of them have been well cared for over the past eight decades, but public officials have proved negligent stewards—and occasionally destructive stewards—of others. Some of San Francisco's murals were considered so controversial at the time they were created that they were modified or even destroyed. Others became controversial later, with calls for modification or destruction. Some of the latter were covered, some were vandalized, and some have deteriorated. Most of the damaged murals have been restored, sometimes more than once. This article looks at the city's New Deal murals at Coit Tower, the Mothers Building at the Zoo, the Beach Chalet, the University of California San Francisco, the Alemany Health Center, Treasure Island/City College, and Rincon Annex/Center, with special attention to the George Washington High School murals that have recently been highly controversial. Controversies over the murals at Coit Tower, Rincon Annex, and George Washington High School also reveal significant changes in the role of the city's political and civic leadership with regard to public art.

California once housed over a dozen monuments, memorials, and place-names honoring the Confederacy, far more than any other state beyond the South. The list included schools and trees named for Robert E. Lee, mountaintops and highways for Jefferson Davis, and large memorials to Confederate soldiers in Hollywood and Orange County. Many of the monuments have been removed or renamed in the recent national reckoning with Confederate iconography. But for much of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, they stood as totems to the “Lost Cause” in the American West. Despite a vast literature on the origins, evolution, and enduring influence of the Lost Cause myth, little is known about how this ideology impacted the political culture and physical space of the American West. This article explores the commemorative landscape of California to explain why a free state, far beyond the major military theaters of the Civil War, gave rise to such a vibrant Confederate culture in the twentieth century. California chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) carried out much of this commemorative work. They emerged in California shortly after the organization's founding in Tennessee in 1894 and, over the course of a century, emblazoned the Western map with salutes to a slaveholding rebellion. In the process, the UDC and other Confederate organizations triggered a continental struggle over Civil War memory that continues to this day.