This week’s episode of then & now is part of a series examining the effects of one of the most powerful and destructive natural disasters in U.S. history: the Los Angeles Wildfires. Co-sponsored by the L.A. History Collaborative— a new consortium of cultural institutions and historians committed to using the tools of history to assist in the reconstruction of the lives and stories of those deeply affected by the L.A. Wildfires—we sit down with E. Randol Schoenberg, an LA-based lawyer and genealogist, to discuss the lives and cultural property lost during this devastating event. As the grandson of Austrian-American composers Arnold Schoenberg and Erich Zeisl, both of whom emigrated to the U.S. to escape the terror of Nazism in Europe and subsequently settled in West L.A, Randy serves as a custodian of his family’s historical legacy. Tragically, Randy's family not only lost several homes in the fires but also the entire inventory of sales and rental materials from Belmont Music Publishers, which included manuscripts, original scores, and printed works. The German-Jewish immigrant community has experienced significant cultural loss due to the wildfires, as the Pacific Palisades has historically served as a social hub for German-speaking cultural figures in the mid-twentieth century. In order to memorialize what has been lost, Randy underscores the necessity of recounting and documenting this critical history.

E. Randol Schoenberg is an American lawyer and genealogist, based in Los Angeles, California, specializing in legal cases related to the recovery of looted or stolen artworks, particularly those by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. Schoenberg is widely known as one of the central figures of the 2015 film Woman in Gold, which depicted the case of Maria Altmann against the government of Austria. He is also the subject of the 2023 genealogical documentary Fioretta.

Further Reading

• Belmont Music Publishers
• A treasure house of composer Arnold Schoenberg’s music destroyed in Palisades fire
• After Nazi Plunder, A Quest To Bring Home The 'Woman In Gold'
• Villa Aurora

This week’s episode of then & now is part of an occasional series exploring the past, present, and future of U.S. foreign policy and the U.S.-led international order with guest host Dr. Ben Zdencanovic. Joined by Dr. Stephen Wertheim, Senior Fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, we critically examine the far-reaching implications for U.S. foreign policy during the second Trump administration. Stephen characterizes Trump's foreign policy as unpredictable and a departure from traditional diplomatic norms. Specifically, he notes Trump’s avowedly “America First” action and rhetoric, using tariffs seemingly for negotiation purposes rather than as an economic measure and bringing the right-wing culture war to the federal workforce, which has resulted in a partial bureaucratic dismantling. Stephen warns that this approach and Trump’s routine bluffs raise concerns about the long-term impact on the U.S.'s global standing and our relationships with allies. 

Ben Zdencanovic is a Postdoctoral Associate at the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. Ben is a historian of the United States in the world, domestic and international politics, and economic and social policy. He has a particular interest in the relationship between U.S. global power and the politics of redistribution and welfare state. Ben earned his doctorate with distinction from the Department of History at Yale in 2019, where his dissertation was the winner of the Edwin W. Small Prize for outstanding work in United States history. Prior to coming to UCLA, Ben was a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale Jackson School for Global Affairs and an Assistant Instructional Professor at the University of Chicago. 

Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A historian of U.S. foreign policy, he analyzes contemporary problems in American strategy and diplomacy. Wertheim has published scholarly research on a range of subjects and concepts in U.S. foreign policy from the late nineteenth century to the present. He is the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Harvard University Press, 2020), a Foreign Affairs book of the year, which reveals how the United States decided to pursue global military dominance as an effectively perpetual project. Named one of “the world’s 50 top thinkers for the Covid-19 age” by Prospect magazine, Wertheim regularly comments on current events.

Further Reading

What will Trump 2.0 mean for the global world order?

In this week’s episode of then & now, we are joined by Dr. Isaac Stanley-Becker, a reporter on intelligence and national security issues for The Washington Post, to examine the rise and partial fall of the Schengen Zone amid ongoing and polarizing debates regarding immigration policy. Through the lens of his dual expertise as a journalist and a historian, Isaac explores the origins and historical progression of the Schengen Zone in his recent publication, Europe Without Borders. Established in 1985, the Schengen Zone was created as an area facilitating free movement across Europe in the aftermath of World War II, symbolizing European unity and liberal internationalism. However, contemporary discourse frequently associates it with Europe’s migration crisis, fueling a backlash against globalization. While the Schengen Zone has significantly transformed European society, it has also consistently excluded non-Europeans, particularly migrants of color from former colonies of the Schengen member states. Isaac concludes with the assertion that the Schengen Zone is currently facing a precarious situation. Highlighting the rising prevalence of illiberal populism and anti-immigrant fury in both Europe and the United States, he posits that if Europe can develop and implement a more effective burden-sharing system for asylum seekers, the viability of the Schengen Zone could be maintained in a more coherent manner.

Isaac Stanley-Becker is a staff writer for The Washington Post, focusing on intelligence and national security. With a PhD in history from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes scholar, he has been an investigative reporter on the national staff and reported from across Europe. He recently published Europe without Borders: A History (Princeton University Press 2025), an investigation into the origins and development of the Schengen area of Europe. He was also part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2024 for “American Icon,” a series exploring the role of the AR-15 in American life.

Further Reading

The Schengen Area

2015: The year of Europe's refugee crisis

This week’s episode of then & now is the first in a series examining one of the most powerful and destructive natural disasters in U.S. history, the Los Angeles wildfires. Joined by Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University Stephen Pyne, one of the country’s leading thinkers about fire, we discuss the history of urban fire to understand what is unfolding in Los Angeles—where lives, communities, histories, and large swaths of nature are being destroyed before our eyes. Informed by his wide-ranging perspective on fire management, Stephen situates the L.A. wildfires within a broader historical perspective. He describes the current era as the Pyrocene, the age of the Fire.  He suggests that while nuisance fires have decreased, we now face dire conditions worsened by factors such as climate change, land use, and the burning of fossil fuels—all of which highlight the need for a fundamental reorganization of our lives. To conclude, he stresses the importance of avoiding the conditions that cause massive destruction, especially the burning of fossil fuels, and advocates for a thoughtful reassessment of our relationship with fire that minimizes the risk of future destructive events.


Stephen Pyne is an Emeritus Professor of Life Sciences at Arizona State University.  He spent 15 seasons with the North Rim Longshots, a Grand Canyon National Park fire crew. Out of those seasons emerged a scholarly interest in the history and management of fire, with major surveys for America, Australia, Canada, Europe (including Russia), and the Earth. He has written 40 books, mostly on the history and management of wildland and rural fire, including a multi-volume fire history of the U.S. and its regions since 1960 (University of Arizona Press). 


Further Reading
Human use of fire has produced an era of uncontrolled burning: Welcome to the Pyrocene
2025 Los Angeles Fires

**Content Warning: This episode includes discussion of sexual and domestic violence.


In this week’s episode of then & now, guest host Professor Jared McBride is joined by Dr. Joy Neumeyer to discuss her recent book, A Survivor’s Education. In the book, as well as this episode, Joy interweaves her own experiences of domestic abuse and the bureaucracy surrounding Title IX with Soviet and Russian history and examines gender and violence norms within the profession of history and academia writ large. Within the context of the #MeToo movement, Joy reflects on the enduring struggle that victims of abuse face due to the common propensity to amplify and repeat the narratives that are spread by perpetrators of violence. Informed by her extensive research on the history and application of Title IX—including the procedural tribulations of her own case—Joy intertwines the past and present and challenges the postmodernist approach to historical methodology with regard to truth narrativity and meaning. Joy concludes with the sentiment that historians can never be truly objective. Instead, they must expose their positionality and the personal, political, and social factors shaping their narrative about the past.


If you are experiencing abuse or are concerned about someone you know, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline (1-800-799-7233) or visit http://www.thehotline.org.


Joy Neumeyer is a journalist and historian of Russia and Eastern Europe. She received a PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a Fulbright Fellow in Russia and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She has also worked as a reporter in Moscow and Warsaw. Her first book, A Survivor’s Education: Women, Violence, and the Stories We Don’t Tell (PublicAffairs, 2024), is an investigative memoir about abuse and the tension between narrative and evidence in understanding the past. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, New Left Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.


Jared McBride is an assistant professor in the UCLA Department of History and is an expert on the history of Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe in the 20th century.  His research examines mass violence, the Holocaust, interethnic conflict, nationalist movements, and war crimes prosecution. McBride’s research has been supported by fellowships, including the Guggenheim, SSRC, and Fulbright-Hays.


Further Reading
Darkness at Noon: On History, Narrative, and Domestic Violence
Title IX
Bernice Sandler
#MeToo Movement

**Content Warning: This episode includes discussion of sexual and domestic violence.
 

In this week’s episode of then & now, LCHP Assistant Director Dr. Rose Campbell is joined by Dr. Shannon Speed to discuss systemic violence against Indigenous women. According to a 2016 study, Indigenous women are 10 times more likely to be kidnapped or murdered than almost any other population group in the United States. Although murder is the third leading cause of death among Indigenous women, these cases often go unsolved and unreported and attract little attention outside of local communities. Shannon discusses the policies that render Indigenous women particularly vulnerable to violence and underscores the impact of settler capitalism—specifically white supremacy and patriarchal ideologies—not only in the U.S. but also in the colonial history of Mexico. Compounding these factors is the jurisdictional vacuum found in Indian country, where U.S. federal laws have severely limited the ability of tribal law enforcement and tribal courts to prosecute violent crimes. In order to address the deep-seated structural and ideological factors that generate and perpetuate this cycle of violence against Indigenous women, Shannon advocates for a tribal sovereignty framework informed by a concern for human rights that aims to interrupt the cycle of violence and focus on a restorative rather than a more punitive approach.


Dr. Shannon Speed is a tribal citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is Director of the American Indian Studies Center (AISC) and Professor of Gender Studies and Anthropology at UCLA. Dr. Speed has worked for the last two decades in Mexico and in the United States on issues of indigenous autonomy, sovereignty, gender, neoliberalism, violence, migration, social justice, and activist research. Her recent work, Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler Capitalist State (University of North Carolina Press 2019), won the Best Subsequent Book Award of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association in 2019 and a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title award in 2020. She has a new co-edited volume entitled Heightened States of Injustice: Activist Research on Indigenous Women and Violence (University of Arizona Press 2021). Dr. Speed was the President of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) from 2019-2020. 


Further Reading
Native Hope; National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center; Violence Against Women Act (VAWA); Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe.

In this week’s episode of then & now, UCLA undergraduates Stephanie Zager, Michaela Esposito, and Ella Kitt join us to discuss the results of their LCHP report on the evolution of the Fairfax District in Los Angeles. The three researchers chronicle the district's rise and decline against the backdrop of the inevitable ebbs and flows of urban change. Influenced by migration patterns, economic development, and demographic shifts, Fairfax’s identity and outside perception have evolved significantly throughout its history. To understand this evolution better, Stephanie, Michaela, and Ella explored the policies and political initiatives within and outside the neighborhood, conducted research in the largely unknown archive of the late ethnographer Barbara Myerhoff, and undertook their own fieldwork within the neighborhood. They conclude by arguing that culturally informed policy is necessary both to honor and acknowledge the cultural history of neighborhoods while also embracing their evolution.


Stephanie Zager is an undergraduate student at UCLA, majoring in History and minoring in Information and Media Literacy. Stephanie currently serves as the Principal Investigator for the LCHP project focused on the Fairfax district of Los Angeles. Her research delves into the transformation of the Fairfax neighborhood, exploring how it has evolved and shifted from its Jewish identity. 

Michaela Esposito is an undergraduate student at UCLA majoring in History, with a particular interest in Holocaust studies and Jewish history. Michaela was awarded an undergraduate research fellowship by the UCLA Leve Center for Jewish Studies, in which she had the opportunity to edit and prepare for the publication of a Belgian Holocaust survivor’s memoir.

Ella Kitt is an undergraduate student majoring in history and Russian studies at UCLA and is a member of UCLA’s Russian Flagship Program. She is researching the history of the Jewish community in the Fairfax neighborhood of Los Angeles, delving into the policy roots of demographic change within the district.

This week’s episode of then & now is the second in a series exploring the historical backdrop to and consequences of the 2024 election. Joining us are Raphael Sonenshein, a nationally recognized expert on racial and ethnic politics in California and Los Angeles, and Zev Yaroslavsky, one of Los Angeles's best-known public officials. This episode begins by continuing the discussion of historical trendlines on the national level and then moves into an analysis of key developments at the California state, county, and city levels. To understand these developments, Raphe Sonenshein cautions against becoming victims of presentism and instead puts these developments into a global context. Citing factors including race, culture, and gender, he addresses the phenomenon of incumbent parties continuing to suffer defeats in elections worldwide. Zev continues by commenting on voter turnout, the shift in California politics, and examines what democracy will look like four years from now in the wake of efforts to suppress voter turnout. While noting the impossibility of knowing exactly what will happen over the next four years on a national level, they discuss the importance of local government solving city-level problems, much of which relies upon a fiscal partnership with the federal government.

Raphael Sonenshein is the Executive Director of the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation. Previously, he served as the Executive Director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State LA. His book Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles (Princeton, 1993) won the American Political Science Association’s 1994 Ralph J. Bunche Award. 

Zev Yaroslavsky is the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the Luskin School of Public Affairs. He served as LA City Council Member from 1975 to 1994, and as LA County Supervisor from 1994 to 2014. In his recently released memoir, Zev's Los Angeles: From Boyle Heights to the Halls of Power, Zev reflects on his long career in politics. 

In this week’s episode of then & now, we explore the 2024 presidential election and try to understand the enduring impact of a political realignment that began with Donald Trump’s rise in 2016. Joining us is Professor Lynn Vavreck, a UCLA professor and leading expert on U.S. elections. Professor Vavreck explores how Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024 reflect a seismic shift in American politics from debates over government size to deeply polarizing cultural and identity issues. This realignment, she argues, has reshaped the electorate, with Trump solidifying a coalition built on economic grievances and cultural anxiety. Vavreck connects the economic frustrations that drove the 2024 election to broader historical trends, tracing parallels between the Reagan-era focus on deregulation and morality and today’s identity-inflected politics. She explains that Trump’s success stemmed from his willingness to vocalize attitudes on identity and economic issues that other politicians avoided, making him appear more relatable and aligned with voters’ concerns. Meanwhile, Democrats struggled to counter this with a cohesive message, as the immediacy of economic frustrations and inflation overshadowed their achievements under the Biden-Harris administration. Looking ahead, Vavreck discusses the potential impact of Trump’s second term on government policy and structure, as well as the opportunities and challenges Democrats face in crafting a compelling vision for 2028. 

Lynn Vavreck is the Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy at UCLA, renowned for her expertise in voter behavior, campaign strategy, and the intersection of economics and elections. She is the co-author of acclaimed books such as The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election and Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America, which explore the critical factors shaping recent presidential races. Vavreck’s research has been pivotal in understanding how political messaging and economic conditions influence voter decision-making and electoral outcomes. 

In this week’s episode of then & now, we present a recording of a recent event hosted by the UCLA History Department, "Why History Matters: Reproductive Rights and Justice." This event brought together experts to explore the far-reaching effects of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June 2022. Hosted by Kevin Terraciano, the conversation delves into the historical misuse of legal doctrines to limit reproductive freedoms and calls for a comprehensive reproductive justice framework that extends beyond abortion to include the right to have or not have children and to raise children in safe environments. Professor Cary Franklin critiques the Supreme Court's "history and tradition" test in Dobbs, arguing it distorts historical perspectives on liberty and equality, while Dean Alexandra Minna Stern discusses the lasting impacts of eugenic sterilization on marginalized groups, emphasizing how patterns of reproductive oppression persist today. Professor Elizabeth O’Brien examines Mexico’s recent Supreme Court rulings decriminalizing abortion and highlights grassroots activism's role in shaping a broader framework for reproductive rights in Latin America. In the U.S., maternal mortality and preventable deaths have risen sharply since the Dobbs decision, underscoring the panel’s call for historical research to inform advocacy as surveillance and criminalization of reproductive health grow. Through these comparative perspectives, the discussion powerfully illustrates how understanding historical contexts can guide efforts to protect and expand reproductive rights in the U.S.

Kevin Terraciano is a Professor and the Department Chair of History at UCLA. He specializes in Latin American history, especially Mexico and the Indigenous cultures and languages of central and southern Mexico. Among many books and translations, he is the author of The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: Ñudzahui History, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries, a comprehensive study of Mixtec society and their adaptation to colonial rule.

Cary Franklin is the McDonald/Wright Chair of Law at UCLA and serves as the faculty director of the Williams Institute at UCLA as well as the Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including the Harvard Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the NYU Law Review, the Supreme Court Review, the Virginia Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal.

Alexandra Minna Stern is a professor of English and history and the Dean of UCLA’s Division of Humanities. She co-directs the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, which studies eugenic sterilization practices in the U.S. and their impact on marginalized groups. She is the author of the award-winning Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, and the author of Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America, which was named a Choice 2013 Outstanding Academic Title in Health Sciences.

Elizabeth O’Brien is an Assistant Professor in the UCLA Meyer and Renee Luskin Department of History, specializing in the history of reproductive health in Mexico. Professor O’Brien is also a member of the cross-field group in the History of Gender and Sexuality. Professor O’Brien's 2023 book on colonialism and reproductive healthcare in Mexico, Surgery and Salvation: The