This article re-evaluates the nature of Indigenous labor at Central California’s New Helvetia colony. The fur trade in Central California was not simply a vehicle for settler exploitation of Indigenous labor but a dynamic trade network shaped by Plains Miwok– and Valley Nisenan–speaking trappers and traders, Mission San José, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and white settlers. Analysis of the financial aspects of trade for the Indigenous trappers and ethnohistorical examination of their motives for engaging in the trade suggest that the fur trade was not a source of degradation and dependency, but a vehicle by which they creatively and purposefully engaged colonial forces and markets. This article orients the histories of Plains Miwok– and Valley Nisenan–speaking communities into the larger story of the North American fur trade and suggests New Helvetia and its fur trade can be better understood as what historian Lisbeth Haas calls “Indigenous colonial” creations.

This article covers the controversy that followed the March 16, 1893 escape of prisoner Yosaku Imada to the Japanese warship, the Naniwa , which was docked in Honolulu. Imada’s act of seeking refuge onboard the ship occurred at a time when the provisional government of Hawai‘i had no extradition treaty with Japan. This created a diplomatic event that entangled leaders from Japan, the provisional government, and the United States. To further complicate matters, Issei and Meiji government officials were also pressing for franchise in the Islands, a right that a majority of the community did not have access to at home. By placing Imada’s escape and the Issei fight for voting rights in the context of the uncertainty that followed the January 17, 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, this article emphasizes Hawai‘i’s relevance as a site where inter-imperial dynamics aligned with competing settler colonialisms.

This article examines how the missionary work of Paramahansa Yogananda, founder of the Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF), promised to advance the American way of life while re-affirming the traditional and authentic nature of his message. Drawing on Yogananda’s writing and the SRF’s in-house publication, this cultural history contextualizes Yogananda’s career within processes of decolonization, America’s deepening economic and political connections to the developing world, and consumer-driven shifts in the religious marketplace. Yogananda’s message provided a means for managing difference while seeking to forge greater sentimental, cultural, and commercial connections between the United States and India. His career offers insights into how American “exceptionalism” met the challenges of global cultural exchange amid geopolitical imaginaries of the nation’s burgeoning empire.

This article investigates white-black race relations in postwar urban Kansas. Focusing on seven small and mid-sized cities, it explores how white Kansans continued to maintain discrimination, segregation, and exclusion in these years, even as they yielded slowly to the demands of civil rights activists and their supporters. Specifically, it examines the means employed by whites to assert their dominance in social interactions; to discriminate in housing, employment, and commerce; and, in some cases, to defend their all-white (or nearly all-white) municipalities, the so-called sundown towns, from any black presence at all. In addition, it briefly discusses the white backlash which followed as whites turned sharply to the right on racial issues, convinced that blacks now enjoyed full equality and no longer required further concessions. In so doing, the article provides insight into the history of the black freedom struggle in a sampling of cities in a midwestern state, supplements the historiography of racism in Kansas, and opens new lines of inquiry into the historiography of the freedom struggle in the North during this period of rapid and profound transformation.

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.