Strong Winds and Widow Makers: Workers, Nature, and Environmental Conflict in Pacific Northwest Timber Country
Often cast as villains in the Northwest’s environmental battles, timber workers in fact have a connection to the forest that goes far beyond jobs and economic issues. Steven C. Beda explores the complex true story of how and why timber-working communities have concerned themselves with the health and future of the woods surrounding them. Life […]
Visions of the Southland: A Year in Los Angeles County
When many of us picture Los Angeles, we’re actually thinking of LA County. Home to roughly ten million people, the county alone is more populous than forty-two US states. Its eighty-eight cities include places made famous by Hollywood glamor and California dreaming—Beverly Hills, Malibu, and Santa Monica—but also working-class municipalities and the self-explanatory City of […]
Pasadena Before the Roses: Race, Identity, and Land Use in Southern California, 1771–1890
Incorporated in 1886 by midwestern settlers known as the Indiana Colony, the City of Pasadena has grown into a world-famous tourist destination recognized for the beauty of its Tournament of Roses Parade, the excitement of the annual Rose Bowl, and the charm of the Old Town District. But what existed before the roses? Before it […]
Deep Time in the Mono Lake Basin: Nature and History over the Last 10,000 Years
In this sweeping environmental history of the Mono Lake Basin, Robert B. Marks reveals a larger story of how human actions and natural forces shape the environment. He begins with the region’s Indigenous peoples, followed by the mid-nineteenth-centry arrival Euro-American settles and the dispossession of the Kootzaduka’a people. In the decades that followed, struggles for […]
Spelunking Rob Roy Kelly’s collection; or, Adventures in typographic realia
Rob Roy Kelly’s published research — including American Wood Type 1828–1900 (1969) — helped fuel a revival of interest in nineteenth-century American printing types. His work continues to be an important starting point for current scholarly inquiry. The University of Texas Press published a monograph David Shields researched, wrote, and designed: The Rob Roy Kelly […]
Assailing Mists of Tradition: The Deseret Alphabet Experience
Following the 1847 establishment of a community in the Salt Lake Valley by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Church leaders established the University of Deseret. Its Board of Regents was made up of many of the Church’s leading figures and held its meetings in Brigham Young’s offices. Their purpose was to establish […]
Assailing Mists of Tradition: The Deseret Alphabet Experience
Following the 1847 establishment of a community in the Salt Lake Valley by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Church leaders established the University of Deseret. Its Board of Regents was made up of many of the Church’s leading figures and held its meetings in Brigham Young’s offices. Their purpose was to establish […]
How Sierra Gold Made California and Remade America
American California was defined by the Gold Rush. That event landed at a very special time, the interregnum between Mexican and American rule. That timing led to profound changes in the settling of the West, the laws applied to land and water, and the growth of America that would determine the winner of the Civil […]
California’s Diverse Food and Farming Movements
How we grow, harvest, distribute, and consume food is bound up with how we use (and abuse) environmental resources, and how we achieve (or undermine) collective well-being. In North Stars of Emancipation, Antonio Roman-Alcalá finds in the radical experiments of new food movements the seeds of a world liberated from old, extractive systems, where a more […]
Behind the Scenes with Transit Books: A California Publisher with Global Reach
What does it take to bring a remarkable book into the world? Join the copublishers of Transit Books for a behind-the-scenes conversation about the role of award-winning, nonprofit publishing—from discovering singular voices and acquiring international literature to editing, designing, translating, producing, and championing books that find devoted readers around the world. Founded in 2015 in […]