Anita de la Guerra of Santa Barbara married Boston merchant Alfred Robinson in 1836. Taken to the East Coast the following year, she diligently pursued her education and she acculturated while retaining her own priorities, including a patriotic position on Mexican California opposed to her husband’s espousal of “American colonization.” She also facilitated East Coast educations for her children and several nephews that would enhance their opportunities in the new U.S. state of California. In 1852 she was finally able to reunite with her family and fit back into Californio society. The author bases this Californiana’s character and cultural agility on a cache of letters written by Anita de la Guerra, complemented by those written by Robinson and the de la Guerra family.

The Lovell Health House (1927–1929) by Richard Neutra for Dr. Phillip Lovell and his wife, Leah Lovell, was a turning point in modern architecture. The house not only carried out Phillip Lovell’s principles of healthy living, it also incorporated a school conducted along the progressive educational theories embraced by Leah Lovell. This article identifies the educational features in Neutra’s plan. Interviews with one of the last remaining students of the school shed light on the students and faculty and how the design served the school’s curriculum. Neutra’s innovative design accommodating the progressive educational program at the Lovell Health House belongs in any discussion of the later school designs for which he won lasting acclaim.

This article examines the political mobilization of Japanese Americans by the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) against the 1969 firing of Los Angeles County Coroner Thomas Noguchi. By challenging the racism in the Noguchi case, the JACL opened a public discussion of the racism behind wartime incarceration, rejecting the quiescence that had marked Japanese Americans as the “model minority.” Activism in the Noguchi case proved the potential of grassroots organizing and built experience in forming cross-racial political alliances, effectively shaping political narrative in the media, and exercising clout in city politics. For Japanese Americans and the JACL, these experiences shaped a new political sensibility that underscored civil rights and served as a precursor to the later redress movement.

At the height of the Cold War, in both the US and the Soviet Union, top technical talent was ensconced in state-of-the-art laboratories set among new suburbs with cultural amenities. In Orange County, California, defense research labs were enticed by capitalist strategies; in the USSR, by government command. In both, the new white-collar suburbs made moves to the new centers attractive. The architecture of the housing as well as of the research labs reveals the faith in technology, shifting to a bunker mentality in the Vietnam era. In the USSR, research institutes were set far from city centers. Their architecture and artworks were boldly modern, their engineers and scientists housed in modern apartments among parklands. Reflecting declining military contracts by the 1990s, Orange County’s “think factories” were demolished or repurposed; upscale master-planned communities drew affluent commuters. Former Soviet research institutes morphed into universities and computer and electronics centers, surrounded by exclusive residential communities. There are striking parallels.

This article brings to light the work of six bridge engineer-designers whose Southern California bridges facilitated transportation in the 1910–1930 period of the region’s explosive growth. Their firms were local, most were architects as well as engineers, and their bridges remain cherished landmarks.

Academic histories have focused on urban centers, overshadowing neighboring towns and agricultural areas as if they didn’t matter. The formal archives that house the records of (white) leaders obscure the experiences and perspectives of migrant workers, communities of color, and others in places such as Southern California’s Inland Empire, which are important to arriving at a fuller historical understanding. The author identifies as “Rebel Archives” sources created by those overlooked by mainstream accounts, including family photo albums, school records, popular media, oral histories, and “counter-mapping.” Analysis of such diverse sources can reveal patterns that cause us to ask questions and rethink history. The article concludes with several noteworthy projects of “subversive history” that are uncovering an enriched history of the Inland Empire.

The Los Angeles Plaza Community Center (PCC), an early twentieth-century Los Angeles community center and clinic, published El Mexicano , a quarterly newsletter, from 1913 to 1925. The newsletter’s reports reveal how the PCC combined walk-in medical visits with broader efforts to address the overall wellness of its attendees. Available records, some with occasional clinical details, reveal the general spectrum of illnesses treated over a twelve-year span. Placed in today’s context, the medical care given at this center was simple and minimal. The social support it provided, however, was multifaceted. The center’s caring extended beyond providing medical attention to helping with education, nutrition, employment, transportation, and moral support. Thus, the social determinants of health (SDH), a prominent concern of present-day public health, was a concept already realized and practiced by these early twentieth-century Los Angeles Plaza community leaders. Such practices, although not yet nominally identified as SDH, had their beginnings in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social activism movement aiming to mitigate the social ills and inequities of emerging industrial nations. The PCC was one of the pioneers in this effort. Its concerns and successes in this area were sophisticated enough to be comparable to our current intentions and aspirations.

During the second half of the Great Migration, circa 1940s–1970s, many Creole Louisianans migrated to Los Angeles, where they established recreational social clubs like those in New Orleans. This article analyzes the experiences and social functions of the clubs among first and second generations based on personal interviews, revealing the shifting roles and meanings across regions and generations. It enriches our understanding of the Great Migration and the clubs’ roles in fostering migrant adaptation and social cohesion among one element of the Los Angeles Black population.

The television sitcom The Brady Bunch (1969–1974) and its subsequent reruns presented upper-middle-class whiteness and a version of idealized family life as normative. Its underrepresentation of racial, ethnic, and class differences did more than serve as a form of escapism for young Latina/o television watchers—it impacted their sense of identity and self-esteem, their attitudes toward their own parents, and their own later modes of parenting, as the author’s personal experience illustrates. At the same time, the series’ few episodes that did depict minority characters encouraged stereotyping that influenced the larger population. A content and visual analysis of episodes of The Brady Bunch confirms the sitcom’s repeated themes of gender and sexuality and its near absence of focus on differences of race, ethnicity, and class.