The Clark Kerr era in the history of the University of California (1952–1967) was marked by momentous social and cultural upheaval, much of which was fought out across the UC system's then eight campuses, particularly Berkeley and UCLA. No issue sparked greater student action than civil rights, which was a challenge that Kerr confronted first as Berkeley chancellor and then as president of the entire UC system. This challenge was met in every area of the university's affairs, including its athletics programs. Kerr demanded that the university's teams schedule games with the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities, whose academic profiles matched its own. These included segregated southern institutions, whose varsity teams were still composed entirely of white athletes and, in some cases, demanded the segregation of competitors by race. These games presented unique challenges for a university that Kerr considered “a portal open to all able young people,” since such competitive and commercial affiliations with segregated institutions called into question the university's sincerity in committing itself to equal educational opportunity. By digging deeply in the university archives at both Berkeley and UCLA, this article reveals how Kerr and his administration promoted the university's affiliation with these southern institutions without taking the racial politics of these games into serious consideration. In turn, the article reassesses the university's racial record in the Kerr era and its commitment to protecting the civil rights of the black student athletes who competed on its varsity teams.

Between 1900 and 1930, Los Angeles attracted thousands of white and black migrants from the Midwest and the South. Many had attachments to Protestant churches. But they also arrived with commitments to Freemasonry, Spiritualism, and social reform causes. This paper argues that these religionists in Los Angeles covered a broad spectrum of faiths, including Free Thought, innovative versions of Protestantism, and Freemasonry, and that traditional accounts of religion in the city have ignored these aspects of religious life and civic engagement. As World War I ushered in conservatism in every aspect of public life, the Los Angeles Times , the City Council, and the Protestant churches combined in an effort to squash these challenges to orthodoxy. In profiling two prominent Spiritualists, African American George W. Shields and white midwesterner Cynthia Lisetta Vose, this article illustrates the wide ranging civil and religious engagement of two committed Spiritualists. By the end of the 1920s, the fragmentation of Los Angeles neighborhoods and the growing racism of the city had nearly destroyed what had been a vigorous religion and a thriving commitment to progressive reform. Segregated white women's clubs and Freemasonry organizations turned the worship of California into a replacement for older forms of religious practice and civic engagement.

In 1915, the California Commission of Immigration and Housing (CCIH) unveiled a bold new experiment: the Home Teacher Program. In Los Angeles, this program sent volunteers into Mexican communities to teach immigrant women new, more “American” ways of homemaking and childrearing. The lesson plans, sample dialogues, teacher testimonies, and photographs featured in CCIH publications provide a fascinating window on to the tense interactions between home teachers and immigrant women. Scholars have long explored different ways of mining institutional records and other forms of writing by Americanization advocates for insights into the experiences of those who participated in the programs. This essay contributes to the discussion of California's Americanization curricula in two ways: First, I provide a close reading of CCIH texts in order to uncover and analyze three layers of recorded experience: (1) teacher biases confronted by immigrant women; (2) immigrant women's difficult material realities; and (3) immigrant women's complex responses to Americanization. Second, I provide further evidence for the view that Mexican immigrant women responded to Americanization efforts in a variety of ways, from outright resistance to milder forms of pushback and, at times, conditional acceptance of the “American” customs presented to them. In light of the evidence, I argue that Mexican immigrant women were “doing the impossible” by laying claim to a piece of California through the complex relationship they negotiated with the home teachers. Although Americanization programs intended to flatten Mexican women's ethnic affiliations, the immigrant women found subtle ways to assert their agency, survive hardship and prejudice, and forge a new Mexican American ethnic community in the process.

The unbuilt proposals for the 1939 San Francisco World's Fair offer a cross section of designs put before the public in a formative moment just before modernism came to dominate architectural discourse and production. Projects by luminaries Bernard Maybeck and Richard Neutra joined projects by Joseph Strauss and Henry Killam Murphy. Here were architectural hopefuls at the nadir of the Great Depression attempting to draw their way into the commission of a lifetime. Thus, a Beaux-Arts bohemian competed with a sincere modernist, a self-promoting engineer, and America's leading practitioner in China. At the same time, the proposals were part of the larger economic and political landscape of San Francisco, as neighborhood associations and politicians used them to attract the fair to their part of the city. More than pie in the sky, these designs show in amplified form the way architecture is embedded in public discourse as a form of persuasion, a kind of politics by other means through which elites and other stakeholders argued for their preferred reality. As tools of intra-urban boosterism, these plans reveal the competing interests within San Francisco at a pivotal moment in its development, when its future lay in the formation of a regional metropolis that could compete with Los Angeles for commerce on the West Coast and beyond.

In late 1945, a group of outraged citizens in the small city of El Cerrito formed a “Good Government League” to challenge the gambling and liquor interests who controlled City Hall. In the next few years the League achieved all of its agenda: a city manager plan, civil service reform, and the end of wide-open gambling. A movement like this was fairly typical of the Progressive Era. But the city in question was not a turn-of-the-century metropolis like New York or Chicago. These events happened in the late 1940s in a small bedroom community located just to the north of Berkeley. Within a few years, El Cerrito transformed its reputation from “Little Reno” to the squeaky-clean “City of Homes.” As a case study, the El Cerrito story is interesting for a number of reasons. Most importantly, it highlights how development in the San Francisco Bay Area has involved a regional periodization that differs from what we might traditionally associate with suburban growth. The city's Old West heritage was a major source of political conflict, while the activism of the city's new middle class contrasts with what sociologists called the politically quiescent “Organization Men” of the era's “Lonely Crowd.” The El Cerrito experience also lends insight into why the Bay Area has remained politically liberal since 1945. The city's reformers embraced much of the language and platform of the turn-of-the-century progressives. But they also lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War, and desired most of all to make public policy that would ensure economic security and equal opportunity. Their emphasis on an active public sector left a legacy that can still be felt today.