History of California Podcast

Today I'm doing something a little different. I'm re-releasing a conversation I recorded back in 2021 with Dr. Iris Engstrand, one of the great historians of California, who passed away on September 12th at the age of 91.

Iris was a native Californian, born in Los Angeles in 1935. She earned her bachelor's, master's, and doctorate in history at the University of Southern California, where she wrote her dissertation on the scientific side of Spanish exploration in New Spain in the late 1700s. That subject, the scientists, naturalists, and explorers who came north under the Spanish flag, stayed at the heart of her work for the rest of her life.

Before she became a university professor, she taught high school in Huntington Beach and worked translating Spanish manuscripts for the Los Angeles County Museum. In 1968 she joined the faculty of the San Diego College for Men, which a few years later became part of the University of San Diego. She taught there for nearly five decades, until her retirement in 2017, and became widely regarded as the foremost authority on the history of San Diego.

Over her career she wrote around 25 books and dozens of papers, including San Diego: California's Cornerstone, a study of the pioneer William Wolfskill, and a translation of José Mariano Moziño's account of Nootka Sound. She co-edited the Journal of San Diego History, served as president of the Western History Association, and received awards of merit from both the San Diego and California Historical Societies. In 2007, the government of Spain honored her with the Order of Isabella the Catholic for her contributions to Spanish history.

Just as important as the books, though, were the generations of students she taught and the countless researchers, museum staff, and fellow historians she mentored and encouraged. I was lucky to spend an hour with her, and I think you'll hear in this conversation the depth of her knowledge and the genuine delight she took in sharing it. It's an honor to bring her voice back to the feed.

Before we get to the interview, I have some news about the future of this show. Starting November 1st, the History of California Podcast is getting a major update. You'll see more content, both here on the podcast feed and over on the Substack. We're expanding our presence on social media, and for the first time, video versions of the episodes will be available. I also want to hear more from you: subscribers will be able to send in their own questions for upcoming guests, so you can help shape the conversations. On top of that, there's a newly updated website and more to come. I'm really excited about this next chapter, and I hope you'll come along for it.

And now, my 2021 conversation with Dr. Iris Engstrand.

In this episode of the History of California Podcast, host Jordan Mattox sits down with writer and chef Joseph Ogilvy to discuss his first book, Tin Can Coast: A History of Industry, Greed, and Fishing in the Golden State. Trained at Oxford and seasoned in restaurant kitchens in London and Austin, Ogilvy came to this history the hard way — gutting sardines, mackerel, and John Dory by the half-ton until a visceral question took hold: if that's what half a ton of fish feels like, what does eight hundred thousand tons look like?

The conversation ranges from the state of fine dining to the craft of nature writing, with Ogilvy explaining how Robert Caro's stage-setting in The Years of Lyndon Johnson became his model for holding many interconnecting threads without losing the reader. He walks Jordan through his research — seven notebooks, each labeled with an animal, and a method that refused to separate archival work from interviews with sardine scientists, chefs, and tuna-boat captains. From there the two dig into the book itself: the California Current as a tendency rather than a place; shifting baseline syndrome and why ecosystems resist being frozen in a single "natural" state; greed as a structural force rather than an individual vice; the otter hunt that first drew Europeans to California and the kelp-forest collapse it set in motion; conservation laws that functioned as anti-Chinese exclusion; the salesmanship of Pop Dolter and Albert Halfhill, who conjured markets for abalone and "chicken of the sea" tuna; and Monterey's Cannery Row, Steinbeck, and the long fight over whether the coast is a place of extraction or leisure. They close on Elinor Ostrom and the commons, the Chumash as a rare success story, extraction as the through-line of California's self-image, and Ogilvy's recommendation of Max Miller's I Cover the Waterfront.

John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle (1936) is the coldest and most clinical of his California labor novels — the story of a fruit strike that offers no easy heroes and no comfort, only a chain of cause and effect grinding toward violence. It's also the book that established Steinbeck as an authority on farm labor and pointed him toward The Grapes of Wrath.

Host Jordan Mattox is joined by Steinbeck scholar Dr. Jon Dawson to unpack the novel and the history beneath it: the real strikes at Tagus Ranch and in the cotton fields, the organizers who inspired — and resented — its characters, the company stores and migrant camps of California's Depression-era agricultural economy, and Steinbeck's complicated relationship to communism, ideology, and violence. Along the way they dig into naturalism and determinism, why the novel keeps its characters at arm's length, the debt the title owes to Milton, and why a labor dispute from 1933 still feels urgent today.

The first installment in our Steinbeck labor series, leading into Of Mice and Men. Plus Dr. Dawson's parallel-reading recommendation: Carey McWilliams's Factories in the Field.

Founded in 1776, the Presidio of San Francisco has served three nations, guarded the "harbor of harbors" for nearly 250 years, and evolved from a modest Spanish adobe fort into a Cold War missile site before becoming one of the country's most successful national parks. Historian John Langellier — former curator of the Presidio Army Museum and author of more than fifty books on the American West — joins Jordan to trace that remarkable arc, drawn from his new book Bastion by the Bay: The Presidio of San Francisco, from Outpost of Empire to Magnificent Park (University of North Texas Press, 2026).

Along the way, John and Jordan get into a lot more than fortifications: what it's like to consult on Hollywood Westerns and the films that actually get history right; whether museums exist to comfort us or to make us a little uncomfortable; the debate over expert authority and community voice in public history; and the Autry Museum and Gene Autry himself. Then they dig into the Presidio's story proper — the Ohlone who lived on the peninsula first, the complexity of the California mission system, the geopolitical paranoia over Russian, French, and British encroachment, the farcical 1876 "sham battle" staged to reassure taxpayers, the Endicott-era coastal buildup, Nike missiles in the Cold War, and the irony that this heavily armed outpost may have mattered most as a place of refuge and rescue.

John also shares how to spend an afternoon in the Presidio (start at Fort Point), reflects on fifty years on the trail of the Buffalo Soldiers, offers his California reading list, and previews what he's working on next.

A rich, wide-ranging conversation about memory, myth-making, and the strange afterlives of the places we build to defend ourselves.

Books mentioned include works by Herbert Eugene Bolton, Hubert Howe Bancroft, and Kevin Starr, plus Langellier's own El Presidio de San Francisco.

The grizzly on California's flag has been gone for a century — hunted to extinction in the very state that made it a symbol. What does it mean to build a mythology of abundance on top of a landscape of loss?

In this episode, host Jordan Mattox sits down with Dr. Daniel Lanza Rivers of San José State University to dig beneath the Golden State's story of endless plenty. A scholar of environmental history, California studies, and settler colonialism, Rivers traces how a century and a half of promises about California's "natural" bounty shaped everything from Central Valley agribusiness to the state's long history of extraction, dispossession, and resistance.

Their conversation follows the throughline at the heart of Rivers's new book, California Futures: Haunted Ecologies, Decolonial Relations (Duke University Press) — out August 18th. The book traces a single powerful thread across the state, from the eradication of the grizzly to the making of Central Valley agriculture, the historic dam removals on the Klamath River, and the unhoused encampments of Oakland. Along the way, Rivers asks a hopeful question: what would it take to build a more just and livable California, one rooted in returning land and in the movements that have never stopped fighting for it?

It's a conversation about loss — but just as much, it's one about hope.

In this episode:

Dr. Daniel Lanza Rivers (they/them) teaches in American Studies at San José State University. Their new book, California Futures: Haunted Ecologies, Decolonial Relations, is available August 18th from Duke University Press.

California had 1,000 wineries in 1910. By 1965, it had 225. The story of how the industry collapsed, came back, and quadrupled past 4,800 wineries today runs straight through one Piedmontese immigrant family — and Kevin Ferguson's.

In this episode, Jordan sits down with Kevin — writer, former brand marketer, and great-grandson of John Gemello, founder of the Gemello Winery in Mountain View — to trace California wine from Prohibition's lost expertise through the 1976 Judgment of Paris and the boutique boom that followed. Along the way: Mike Grgich and Chateau Montelena, Steven Spurrier's reluctant bicentennial marketing stunt, George Taber as the only reporter in the room, and the little-remembered 2001 rematch in which Kevin's grandfather's 1970 Cabernet beat fourteen of sixteen judges' top picks — news he received by phone at age 82.

Plus: a chance meeting at a San Jose hotel that reunited two Piedmontese immigrants and started the Beltramo dynasty, cassette tapes that preserved a family's oral history, and why the best wine, for Kevin, is the one with the best story behind it.

Kevin's Substack

Historian Peter Richardson joins Jordan Mattox to discuss his new book, Brand New Beat: The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine, and to situate the magazine within the broader cultural and political history of the San Francisco Bay Area. Dr. Richardson — whose previous work includes a biography of Carey McWilliams and studies of Ramparts Magazine and the Grateful Dead — argues that Rolling Stone's founding in November 1967 cannot be understood apart from the counterculture it both chronicled and drew its sustenance from, nor apart from the failures of a mainstream media that created the opening for it in the first place.

The conversation traces Richardson's own intellectual trajectory from medieval English literature to California cultural history; revisits McWilliams's argument that California is less a "great exception" than a national avatar; takes up Hunter S. Thompson's ambivalent relationship to the Haight-Ashbury counterculture; and considers Kevin Starr's conspicuous reluctance to address the 1960s in his otherwise comprehensive survey of the state. The episode closes with Richardson's reflections on Theodore Roszak, on whether the conditions for a new counterculture now exist in the shadow of Silicon Valley, and with a set of book and film recommendations for listeners wishing to pursue these threads further.

California wine is often wrapped in romance—rolling vineyards, pioneering families, and world-class vintages. But beneath that familiar story lies a far more complex history of conquest, labor, race, and power. In this episode of the History of California Podcast, Jordan Mattox sits down with historian Dr. Julia Ornelas-Higdon, author of The Grapes of Conquest, to uncover the hidden foundations of one of the state’s most iconic industries.

Together, they trace the evolution of California agriculture from booster-era optimism to the labor struggles of the 20th century, examining how narratives about land, belonging, and identity were shaped—and often distorted—by those in power. From the overlooked role of Indigenous peoples and immigrant laborers to the surprising origins of the Anaheim Wine Colony, this conversation reveals how wine production functioned not just as an economic activity, but as a form of cultural production that helped define who counted as “Californian.”

Along the way, the episode explores historiographical shifts—from triumphalist agricultural histories to labor-centered and race-conscious interpretations—and asks what still remains missing. If California wine tells a story, this episode asks: whose story has it been, and who has been left out?

In this episode of the History of California Podcast, host Jordan Mattox sits down with Ann Carlson to explore the history and legacy of air pollution regulation in California, as told in her book Smog and Sunshine.

The conversation traces the transformation of Los Angeles from one of the most polluted regions in the United States to a global leader in environmental policy. Carlson explains how early misdiagnoses—like the infamous Tucker Report—delayed action, and how scientists, activists, journalists, and government institutions eventually converged to identify automobiles as the primary source of smog .

Mattox and Carlson dig into the mechanics of environmental law, including the shift from bipartisan consensus to regulatory fragmentation, the increasing reliance on federal agencies, and the critical role of states—especially California—in advancing climate policy when the federal government stalls . The episode also highlights the catalytic converter as a case study in how ambitious regulation can drive technological innovation.

The discussion goes beyond policy to examine environmental justice, showing how pollution has historically—and continues to—disproportionately affect low-income communities and communities of color, particularly in regions like the Inland Empire .

Throughout the episode, Carlson makes a broader argument: that environmental progress is not accidental, but the result of sustained pressure from the public, media, scientists, and institutions working together over decades. The episode closes by connecting these historical lessons to the present, asking what California’s experience can teach us about confronting climate change in an era of political polarization and misinformation.

This is a conversation about history as both memory and blueprint—reminding us not just how far we’ve come, but what it might take to move forward.

In this episode of the History of California Podcast, host Jordan Mattox interviews Jenny Chan, founder of the Pacific Atrocities Education Program, about the hidden histories of World War II in the Pacific and the importance of expanding historical education beyond a Western-centric narrative. Drawing from her own family’s experiences and extensive archival research, Chan explains how major events in Asia—from the Japanese invasion of Manchuria to atrocities like Unit 731—have been largely absent from U.S. classrooms.

The conversation explores how her organization works with educators to develop sensitive and accessible lesson plans, the challenges of uncovering fragmented archival materials, and the emotional power of oral histories from survivors. Chan also highlights the surprising ways California is connected to the Pacific Theater, including links to the Doolittle Raid, biological warfare threats, and local historical sites. Together, Mattox and Chan make the case for a more global, interconnected understanding of history—one that better reflects the scale of human experience during World War II and helps students make sense of the present.