10 California History Books

Gualtiere’s book is powerful in many ways, not the least for how it firmly inscribes Arabs into the U.S. American — specifically, Californian — landscape, thereby defying dominant narratives that portray Arabs as inherently Other. Tracing immigration pathways that often result in Syrian immigrants entering the U.S. through its southern border, Arab Routes tells a comprehensive history of Southern California. Perhaps most interesting is Gualtieri’s discussion of histories of solidarity, both across the U.S.-Mexico border and across racial and ethnic lines, and the implications of such histories for the present day.

Just as California is often imagined in terms of its progressive stance on racism, so does it tend to be imagined as equally progressive in terms of its environmental policies. Evolution of a Movement takes a hard look at the work environmental justice activists have been doing since the 1980s, thereby removing the rose-colored glasses to provide a more realistic aspect of environmental justice organizing. Perkins compiles over a hundred interviews with activists throughout California in order to expose the evolving political and activistic landscape in which environmental justice activism occurs. Since there’s a strong chance that reading this book will also lead you to seek out books that look at California’s natural history, you might also want to consider Allan Schoenherr’s A Natural History of California or Obi Kaufmann’s stunningly illustrated The California Field Atlas.

All too often, it seems that people want to focus on California’s coastlines or its cosmopolitan cities; Chasing the Harvest looks instead to California’s fields and the people who work them. It’s an oral history in the vein of Studs Terkel‘s work. Presenting the oral histories of migrant farm workers in California, Thompson’s book showcases a diverse array of experiences in the agricultural fields that produce so much of the U.S.’s crops. It’s essential reading for understanding histories and contemporary realities of agricultural labor — and the exploitation of agricultural laborers — in California.

What do concepts of the American West, American dream, and oppressive HOAs have in common? For Zarsadiaz in this insightful history of Asian assimilation in L.A., the answer is suburbia. Odd as that may sound, this look at the last decades of the 20th century and manifestations of the “model minority” myth in suburbia is a very compelling take on race, power, and privilege. I’ve never been asked to think about the model minority mythos in this way and I have to admit it leaves me with plenty to mull over.

Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness rose swiftly to critical acclaim upon its publication in 2010 for its critique of how the U.S. American prison system disproportionately targets Black Americans in a manner that functions as an extension of Jim Crow racist discrimination. Golden Gulag was published the same year and details the astounding rise in rates of incarceration in California that began during the Reagan administration. Tracking economic and labor histories, Gilmore unflinchingly examines the systemic racism and related dynamics to consider the implications of the California prison system for not only the so-called Golden State, but also the rest of the U.S. and even the globe.

Okay, so The Other California focuses on Baja California…but given the histories that led to the formation of California as part of the United States, I figured it made sense to problematize my own paradigm and offer a text that traverses settler colonial borders. With that in mind, Castillo-Muñoz’s book covers over 100 years from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries. It looks at influential international dynamics that shaped the borderlands of Baja California. Also worth checking out is Frank P. Barajas’s Mexican Americans with Moxie: A Transgenerational History of El Movimiento Chicano in Ventura County, California, 1945–1975.