Today, we have Gary Krist on the show. Gary has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Esquire, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He is the bestselling author of the acclaimed narrative nonfiction books The Mirage Factory, Empire of Sin, City of Scoundrels, and The White Cascade. 

He has also written five works of fiction. Krist has received the Stephen Crane Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Public Scholar fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Lowell Thomas Gold Medal for Travel Journalism, and other awards.

The subject of today’s episode is Gary’s new book Trespassers at the Golden Gate: A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco. 

Here’s the description of the book: 

Shortly before dusk on November 3, 1870, just as the ferryboat El Capitan was pulling away from its slip into San Francisco Bay, a woman clad in black emerged from the shadows and strode across the crowded deck. Reaching under her veil, she drew a small pistol and aimed it directly at a well-dressed man sitting quietly with his wife and children. The woman fired a single bullet into his chest. “I did it and I don’t deny it,” she said when arrested shortly thereafter. “He ruined both myself and my daughter.”

Though little remembered today, the trial of Laura D. Fair for the murder of her lover, A. P. Crittenden, made headlines nationwide. As bestselling author Gary Krist reveals, the operatic facts of the case—a woman strung along for years by a two-timing man, killing him in an alleged fit of madness—challenged an American populace still searching for moral consensus after the Civil War. The trial shone an early and uncomfortable spotlight on social issues like the role of women, the sanctity of the family, and the range of acceptable expressions of gender, while jolting the still-adolescent metropolis of 1870s San Francisco, a city eager to shed its rough-and-tumble Gold Rush-era reputation.

Trespassers at the Golden Gate brings readers inside the untamed frontier town, a place where—for a brief period—otherwise marginalized communities found unique opportunities. Readers meet a secretly wealthy Black housekeeper, an enterprising Chinese brothel madam, and a French rabble-rouser who refused to dress in sufficiently “feminine” clothing—as well as familiar figures like Mark Twain and Susan B. Anthony, who become swept up in the drama of the Laura Fair affair. 

Krist, who previously brought New Orleans to vivid life in Empire of Sin and Chicago in City of Scoundrels, recounts this astonishing story and its surprisingly modern echoes in a rollicking narrative that probes what it all meant—both for a nation still scarred by war and for a city eager for the world stage.

Jack Gedney is the author of The Private Lives of Public Birds: Learning to Listen to the Birds Where We Live and a compact field guide to the trees of the San Francisco Bay Area. Since 2018, he has written a column on local birds, “On the Wing,” for the Marin Independent Journal. Jack currently co-owns a wild bird feeding and nature shop in Novato, California.

The focus of our conversation today is Jack's new book The Birds in the Oaks: Secret Voices of the Western Woods which his wife Angelina beautifully illustrated. Here’s a description of the book: 

The first book on the birds of California’s oaks, from our most lyrical and observant wanderer of the woods.

With charm and delight, The Birds in the Oaks introduces us to the birds who burrow, forage, and soar among California’s keystone trees. The mighty oak hosts a multitude of avian denizens—from canopy hoppers to ground nesters to short-billed surface pluckers—who rely on the trees’ well-stocked pantry of acorns, insects, and flowers for sustenance and shelter. Spunky kinglets, crimson-eyed towhees, cuddle-craving bushtits, intrepid nuthatches, and impudent wrens are among the many memorable cast members in this pageant of oak-allied birds. Jack Gedney lyrically conveys the beautiful, comic, and endearing qualities of over fifteen bird species, each profile paired with an illustration by Angelina Gedney. His bird-filled tales of adaptation, ingenuity, and sheer persistence also bring to light the warp and weft of cross-species interdependence. The Birds in the Oaks reveals to us the utter joy of birds, the superabundant world of the oaks, and the innumerable interconnections these living beings create.

Buy the book here

 Today we have Dr. William Deverell on the show. Dr. Deverell is a professor of History, Spatial Sciences, and Environmental Studies at USC. He's an American historian with a focus on the 19th and 20th century American West. He has written works on political, social, ethnic, and environmental history, and is the founding director of the Huntington USC Institute on California and the West. This was so much fun to record. Bill has written books across an array of areas and subjects. We just had a great time exploring different facets of California history.

We cover a broad range of subjects. We do spend time on his most recent book on Kathy Fiscus, which is a fascinating story about reality television and its origins, but, more broadly, this is a podcast about California history at large, and there's a lot to be learned through this conversation.

Buy William Deverell's New Book Here

Today, we have Dr. James Tejani, Associate Professor of History at Cal Poly San Luis Obisbo, on the show. We will be discussing his new book A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America. 

Here’s the description of the book: 

The Port of Los Angeles is all around us. Objects we use on a daily basis pass through it: furniture, apparel, electronics, automobiles, and much more. The busiest container port in the Western hemisphere, it claims one-sixth of all US ocean shipping. Yet despite its centrality to our world, the port and the story of its making have been neglected in histories of the United States. In A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth, historian James Tejani corrects that significant omission, charting the port’s rise out of the mud and salt marsh of San Pedro estuary―and showing how the story of the port is the story of modern, globalized America itself.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Americans had identified the West Coast as the republic’s destiny, a gateway to the riches of the Pacific. In a narrative spanning decades and stretching to Washington, DC, the Pacific Northwest, Civil War Richmond, Southwest deserts, and even overseas to Europe, Hawaii, and Asia, Tejani demonstrates how San Pedro came to be seen as all-important to the nation’s future. It was not virgin land, but dominated by powerful Mexican estates that would not be dislodged easily. Yet American scientists, including the great surveyor George Davidson, imperialist politicians such as Jefferson Davis and William Gwin, and hopeful land speculators, among them the future Union Army general Edward Ord, would wrest control of the estuary, and set the scene for the violence, inequality, and engineering marvels to come.

San Pedro was no place for a harbor, Tejani reveals. The port was carved in defiance of nature, using new engineering techniques and massive mechanical dredgers. Business titans such as Collis Huntington and Edward H. Harriman brought their money and corporate influence to the task. But they were outmatched by government reformers, laying the foundations for the port, for the modern city of Los Angeles, and for our globalized world. Interweaving the natural history of San Pedro into this all-too-human history, Tejani vividly describes how a wild coast was made into the engine of American power. A story of imperial dreams and personal ambition, A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth is necessary reading for anyone who seeks to understand what the United States was, what it is now, and what it will be.

Dr. Tejani was a joy to talk with. Please enjoy our conversation. 

I am so excited to share today’s episode with you. For those of you who follow my substack, you may know that I have decided to make my way through Steinbeck this year. We started with Pastures of Heaven, a short story cycle that comes a few years after his first publication, called Cup of Gold, which is a historical novel set in Mexico. I decided to skip that first book as Pastures of Heaven turns our gaze to California. I was blown away by this cycle and wrote out my initial reactions to it on the substack. After finishing each volume in Steinbeck’s oeuvre, I will plan to have a podcast discussion with experts about the book, providing the readers and myself the additional context and analysis to make the reading experience richer. And we are fortunate enough to begin this podcast series with a titan of Steinbeck scholarship: Dr. Susan Shillinglaw. Born in Iowa, raised in Colorado, Susan Shillinglaw graduated with a B.A. in English and Art from Cornell College and earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is a Professor Emerita of English at San Jose State University, where she was Director of the University’s Center for Steinbeck Studies for 18 years. In 2012-13 she was named the SJSU President’s Scholar. She was also Director of the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas from 2015-2018.

Dr. Shillinglaw has published widely on John Steinbeck, including Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage (U of Nevada P, 2013) and On Reading The Grapes of Wrath (Penguin, 2014); and A Journey into Steinbeck’s California (3rd edition, 2019) She also wrote introductions to several of Steinbeck books for Penguin New American Library editions. Her most recent title is "Steinbeck’s Uneasy America: Rereading “Travels with Charley,” which she edited with Barbara A. Heavilin. This collection puts together critical scholarship on John Steinbeck’s best-selling, late-career travel memoir. In 1960, Steinbeck was a renowned man of American letters. Many considered him America’s troubadour of ordinary people, the conscience of the country. But weakened by two small strokes and anxious that he had lost touch with America, he embarked on a cross-country road trip accompanied by his wife’s standard poodle, Charley. Two years later, he published Travels with Charley to popular acclaim and robust sales.

In this episode, Dr. Shillinglaw and I discuss Steinbeck’s continued relevance, pertinent biographical information that informs our reading of his text, themes and the structure of Pastures of Heaven, character analysis, and interpretative tools needed for an enriched reading experience. I hope you enjoy this conversation and it encourages you to book up this great short story cycle. 

Today, we have Dr. Brittany Friedman on the show. Dr. Brittany Friedman is a sociologist and expert on cover-ups, politics, and the dark side of institutions. She is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. Friedman's research has appeared in the Washington Post, NPR, The Nation, Jacobin Magazine, and the Associated Press, among others. She is co-founder of the Captive Money Lab and an Affiliated Scholar of the American Bar Foundation. 

She has come on to discuss her new book Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons. Here’s the description: It is impossible to deny the impact of lies and white supremacy on the institutional conditions in US prisons. There is a particular power dynamic of racist intent in the prison system that culminates in what Brittany Friedman terms carceral apartheid. Prisons are a microcosm of how carceral apartheid operates as a larger governing strategy to decimate political targets and foster deceit, disinformation, and division in society.

Among many shocking discoveries, Friedman shows that, beginning in the 1950s, California prison officials declared war on imprisoned Black people and sought to identify Black militants as a key problem, creating a strategy for the management, segregation, and elimination of these individuals from the prison population that continues into the present day. Carceral Apartheid delves into how the California Department of Corrections deployed various official, clandestine, and at times extralegal control techniques—including officer alliances with imprisoned white supremacists—to suppress Black political movements, revealing the broader themes of deception, empire, corruption, and white supremacy in American mass incarceration. Drawing from original interviews with founders of Black political movements such as the Black Guerilla Family, white supremacists, and a swath of little-known archival data, Friedman uncovers how the US domestic war against imprisoned Black people models and perpetuates genocide, imprisonment, and torture abroad.

Buy her book here

Dr. Friedman's Website

Rob Crisell is an author, poet, actor, winemaker, and teacher in Temecula, California. For the past eight years, he has taught poetry and Shakespeare with the Murrieta Valley Union School District. He has been a Shakespeare lecturer with Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. He has acted in The Merchant of Venice, Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged), Baskerville, Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, The Tempest (Prospero), Macbeth, Othello (Iago), and others. He has written and regularly performs several one-man plays featuring Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Shakespeare in America. He’s the author of the children’s novel The Zoo of Impossible Animals (De Portola Press, 2016), Shakespeare’s Book of Wisdom: Advice on Living a Wiser, Happier Life from William Shakespeare & Friends (DPP, 2018), The Fantastic Fables of Aesop (DPP, 2023), Temecula Valley Wineries (Arcadia Publishing, 2023).  His 2016 TED Talk is “How NOT to Hate Shakespeare” can be found on You Tube. His poetry has been published in The Lyric Magazine, the Society of Classical Poets, among other venues. He is a graduate of Yale University and George Mason University Law School.

The focus of our conversation is Rob's newest book is California Avocados: A Delicious History, a fantastic exploration of avos rich and vibrant history. 

Buy Rob's books here. 

In the last episode on the first series about the railroads and California, we conclude by discussing how the Big Four sought to cement the railroads and the meeting the Central and Union Pacific to bind east to west. 

On today's show, we welcome Rebecca John. Rebecca is a Research Fellow at the Climate Investigations Center. She is also a freelance journalist and award-winning documentary film maker. As a Producer and Director of the acclaimed “Extreme Oil” / “Curse of Oil” series for PBS /BBC her work was awarded a Cine Golden Eagle for News Analysis. Other award-winning and nominated series and films include “Churchill” for PBS & ITV, “The Secret World of Richard Nixon” for The History Channel/BBC and “Ambush In Mogadishu” for PBS Frontline/ BBC (winner of the Edward R. Murrow Overseas Press Club of America ‘Best Documentary on Foreign Affairs Award’). Follow her on X at @rebecca_John1.

The article that we are discussing is Revealed: Big Oil Told 70 Years Ago That Fossil Fuel Emissions Could Impact ‘Civilization’.

Today, we welcome Dr. Maxwell Johnson on to the program. He is the author of A Connected Metropolis: Los Angeles Elites and the Making of a Modern City, 1890–1965, a fascinating a book about the development and key players in early days of Los Angeles. 

Buy his book here.