I have had a work in progress for over a year now. Which is to say I've been preparing to work on a historical novel for over a year, but…
In my current WIP, California Incline, the story suggests that the Rodney King riots would never really end in the sense that its root causes were (are) still present:
But even though John had left town, he hadn’t escaped anything, because a riot isn’t an event with a beginning and an end. It’s in the air, like the ashes of the American Dream of immigrants like Yong Soo whose businesses lay in burned-out ruins. The Rodney King riot reached back to the Watts riot a generation earlier, to the Zoot Suit riot a generation before that, and even earlier. As soon as it was over, everyone knew it wasn’t the last riot L.A would have. For all the talk about change, the problems were still there. The hate and the fear, the unemployment, the anger, the repression, the drugs and the gangs . . .
So far, I’ve come across two sources that mentioned using the new state highways (circa 1910-20) as covenient roads for cattle drives. I think it’s an interesting overlapping period. I guess up into the 1920s cattle still needed to be driven to slaughter houses or railroad termini. Up to that point, motorists had to wait for the cattle. (more…)
Apparently, wild mustard made an impression in late-1800s Southern California . . .
The wild mustard in Southern California is like that spoken of in the New Testament, in the branches of which the birds of the air may rest. Coming up out of the earth, so slender a stem that dozens can find starting-point in an inch, it darts up, a slender straight shoot, five, ten, twenty feet, with hundreds of fine feathery branches locking and interlocking with all the other hundreds around it, till it is an inextricable network like lace. (more…)
One of the books I picked up on the bookstore tour was Cattle on the Conejo, by J.H. Russell. It is a collection of reminiscences by a rancher who had…
"The shepherds, the herdsmen, the maids, the babies, the dogs, the poultry, all loved the sight of Ramona." I recently read Ramona, the 1884 novel by Helen Hunt Jackson that launched…
Gente de razón is a Spanish term meaning ¨reasonable people,¨or more closely, ¨people of reason.¨ It's the term the colonial Spanish used to differentiate themselves from indiginous peoples they were subjugating…
I've had a few posts drafted, but was hoping to polish them up a little. I don't seem to be doing that, so I'll just get them up here and…
I started reading up on California history last year because my son, Kazu, was entering fourth grade, and that's what fourth graders study. Next year, the study US History from…
"Two boys drowned an Indian to amuse themselves, but in consideration of their tender years, were dismissed with twenty-five lashes administered in the presence of natives." Bancroft (480) reporting on…