Newly arrived in 1850s California, a group of German immigrants adopted viticulture and founded Anaheim as a wine colony. Along with industry leaders and boosters, they helped expand the region’s commercial wine industry from its Spanish and Mexican roots, using viticulture as a vehicle of Americanization in California. Per the observations of wine industrialists, trade groups, and boosters, these German immigrants represented the American ideal of agricultural citizenship as a barometer of belonging in California. This notion was rooted in large-scale land ownership and relied on modern technology, shipping infrastructure, agricultural science, marketing, and wage workers. Significantly, Anaheim’s German wine growers also employed modern agribusiness techniques that laid the foundation for the citrus industry in the early twentieth century.

The advent of digital newspapers is providing critical historical information for subjects like surfing that have traditionally had so few primary sources available to researchers. A review of newspapers from the early twentieth century reveals important new evidence that the Hawaii Promotion Committee (HPC) helped support the growth of surfing by coordinating a transpacific marketing campaign to highlight the sport for the sake of boosting tourism. However, because the HPC and the newspapers in which it published its weekly reports represented arms of the colonial powers, much of that new information must be understood in the broader context of how the local Caucasian or haole population used the newspapers to promote their own imperial vision of surfing while often ignoring or suppressing Native Hawaiian voices that represented a critical counternarrative. For their part, Native Hawaiians actively resisted the racist and pro-territorial propaganda by publishing their own newspapers and by directly competing against haole in and around the surf.

In 1932 in Depression-era Los Angeles, Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros took advantage of a unique site on Olvera Street to confront Los Angeles’s establishment on behalf of not only Mexican Americans in California but the proletariat everywhere. The resulting mural, América tropical , challenged Los Angeles’s sanitized history of its Mexican past and the persecution of the city’s immigrant working class. The establishment responded by requesting that Siqueiros leave the country and by whitewashing the mural. In the late 1960s, the white overpaint began to fade, and América tropical re-emerged to play a part in another chapter of the politics of race and class in Los Angeles. Revisiting the mural and its destruction illuminates the complex interplay between outdoor art and civic discourse.

This article explores the founding of the Hollywood Bowl and the multiple visions of its founding generation, tracing the cultural negotiations they engaged in between 1918 and 1926. These aims included disseminating high culture to ordinary citizens, democratizing access to music, providing spiritual uplift, unifying Hollywood’s diverse populace, and offering legitimacy to Hollywood as an emerging symbol of the U.S. film industry. By 1926, the Hollywood Bowl that emerged from a contentious planning process reflected aspects of all of the founders’ goals, but did not entirely fulfill those of any one of them. I argue that, despite their disagreements, the Bowl’s founders believed that their collective cultural enterprise had the potential to encourage a sense of cohesion and community among Hollywood’s—and more generally Los Angeles’s—inhabitants. The Hollywood Bowl was the first of many large-scale efforts to give culture permanence in Los Angeles, and its success helped redefine its urban identity by replacing negative images of the region with a growing reputation as a noteworthy cultural metropolis.