In this episode of The History of California Podcast, host Jordan Mattox speaks with historian John Boessenecker about his new book, Bring Me the Head of Joaquin Murrieta: The Bandit Chief Who Terrorized California and Launched the Legend of Zorro.

Long remembered as a Robin Hood–like folk hero — and often portrayed as a symbol of resistance against Anglo oppression — Joaquin Murrieta has occupied a powerful place in California’s cultural imagination. But Boessenecker argues that nearly everything most people believe about Murrieta comes not from history, but from fiction, folklore, and deeply flawed research traditions.

The conversation explores how Murrieta’s legend was shaped by nineteenth-century writers like John Rollin Ridge, later amplified by twentieth-century folklorists, and repeatedly disconnected from primary evidence. Boessenecker explains how modern access to digitized newspapers and archival records allows historians to reconstruct what Murrieta actually did — including acts of extraordinary violence — and why earlier generations so often failed to distinguish myth from fact.

Beyond Murrieta himself, this episode offers a stark portrait of Gold Rush–era California as one of the most violent societies in American history, shaped by racial exclusion, vigilante justice, and a blurred line between criminals and lawmen.

What keeps Chinatown alive?

In this episode of The History of California Podcast, host Jordan Mattox speaks with Dr. Laureen Hom, author of The Power of Chinatown: Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles, about the long history—and ongoing political significance—of Chinatowns in California.

Drawing on her research in Los Angeles Chinatown, Dr. Hom explains how Chinatowns have been shaped by racial exclusion, urban violence, redevelopment, immigration policy, and suburbanization, while also serving as sites of community formation, political organizing, and resistance. The conversation explores how the concept of gentrification has evolved, why displacement is often indirect and difficult to see, and how cities deploy tools like redevelopment agencies, multicultural planning, and business improvement districts to reshape ethnic neighborhoods.

Mattox and Hom also examine Chinatown’s changing demographics, its relationship to suburban Chinese communities in places like the San Gabriel Valley, and the challenges of coalition-building in multiracial neighborhoods where Chinese American and Latino residents share space, history, and vulnerability.

This episode offers a powerful framework for understanding Chinatown not as a static cultural enclave, but as a dynamic political space—one that reveals broader truths about California’s urban history, community power, and the ongoing struggle for spatial justice.

In this episode, host Jordan Mattox sits down with Dr. Michael Zeitler for an expansive conversation about John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat — its mythic structure, its treatment of poverty, the nature of friendship and communal codes, and how Steinbeck used the Monterey landscape to explore deep questions about history and identity. Together they examine the novel’s tragic undercurrents, its echoes of World War I trauma, its links to Mice and Men, Grapes of Wrath, In Dubious Battle, and Cannery Row, and why Steinbeck’s early works continue to provoke debate about caricature, class, and representation. Dr. Zeitler also reflects on Hardy, Haney’s Beowulf, the anthropology of place, car mechanics in Steinbeck, and the philosophical lineage running from Emerson to Ellison. A wide-ranging, insightful discussion for Steinbeck fans and California history enthusiasts alike.