On this episode, Jordan Mattox is joined by journalist and author Catherine Nichols to dive into the wild and little-known true story behind her book Deep Water. The book traces the rise and fall of a sophisticated drug smuggling ring started by a group of high school swim team surfers on the island of Coronado in Southern California. Their story, filled with risk, betrayal, and ambition, opens up unexpected windows into California's social history, coastal culture, and global connections.

They explore the deeper historical context of the 1970s and 1980s in California—from the beaches of Coronado to broader themes of youth rebellion, military secrecy, and underground economies.

In this episode of The History of California Podcast, host Jordan Mattox sits down with author Taylor Kiland to discuss her new book, Murder of the Jujube Candy Heiress: A Coronado Cold Case. Set on the idyllic Coronado Island, the book reinvestigates the unsolved murder of a young heiress, Ruth Quinn, of the Jujube Candy fortune. Kiland shares how she unearthed records, reexamined the evidence, and conducted revealing interviews in an effort to shine a light on a case that still needs a resolution.

In this episode of the History of California Podcast, host Jordan Mattox welcomes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Michael Hiltzik. Hiltzik is the author of Golden State: The Making of California, a fascinating survey of California’s history in the tradition of Kevin Starr’s acclaimed work. As a columnist and reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Hiltzik has written extensively about California’s political, economic, and cultural landscape, as well as authoring several books on the state’s history.

Enjoy this fun and wide-ranging conversation exploring the forces that shaped the Golden State and the insights behind Hiltzik’s compelling storytelling.

Today’s episode is the second part of a two-episode series on John Steinbeck’s novel To a God Unknown. I wanted to do two episodes on this because the novel is fascinating, complex, and at times mystifying—and I wanted to get a few different perspectives to better understand it.

Today’s guest is Dr. Michael Boyden, a professor in both the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures as well as the Institute for Culture and History. His primary interest is in American literature, with a special focus on ecocriticism, Anthropocene studies, and critical sustainability studies.

I read a fascinating article he published on To a God Unknown, which examines the novel from an ecological perspective, and I was eager to talk with him about it. We cover a lot of ground—some topics echo my first conversation with Dr. Rivers—but we dive deeper into the ecological dimensions this time around.

Today we're continuing our series on John Steinbeck. This year, we've been reading through all of Steinbeck's major works. We started with The Pastures of Heaven, and To a God Unknown is the second book in the series. We’ll be doing two podcast episodes on this novel for a couple of different reasons.

First and foremost, it’s probably the strangest, most confusing, and most exploratory of Steinbeck’s works.

I wanted to get a few different perspectives on the meaning of this book—the characters, the plot, the context, and some of the major themes. Our first guest is Dr. Daniel Rivers. Dr. Rivers is an associate professor of American Studies and Literature at San Jose State University and also serves as the director of the Martha Heesley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State.

We had a great conversation. We talked about a lot of things, including Dr. Rivers’s own research and writing on this book.

There’s a lot to learn from this discussion, and I know you'll enjoy it.

Today, we have Elaine Chukan Brown on the show. Brown is a writer, speaker, and global wine educator. Brown is the Napa Valley specialist for Wine Enthusiast and previously served as the Executive Editor US for JancisRobinson.com, a columnist for Decanter magazine, and a contributing writer to Wine & Spirits magazine. They contributed to both the fourth and fifth editions of the Oxford Companion to Wine, the eighth edition of the World Atlas of Wine, and the compendiums On Burgundy and On California from Académie du Vin Library. Indigenous (Inupiaq and Unangan-Sugpiaq) from what is now Alaska, Brown has dedicated their career to the intersection of sustainability, climate action, and reducing gatekeeping in the wine industry. They co-founded the Diversity in Wine Leadership Forum and have advised diversity initiatives in multiple countries. Brown serves as a judge for the Texsom Awards, head judge for the 67 Pall Mall Communicator Awards, and is a board member of the Wine Writer Symposium.

Their new book is The Wines of California. Here’s a description of the book and click here to buy it:

A concise, complete, smartly delivered and cohesive book for serious readers and students of wine. Focusing on the world’s fourth largest producer of wine – California – the book takes readers on a journey through the Golden State’s wines, paying due attention to famous wine destinations such as Sonoma and Napa as well as introducing readers to exciting lesser-known regions to explore. The book is divided into three major sections. The first looks at California wine in the context of the history of the state as a whole. It addresses key issues in California wine growing such as Indigenous Peoples and land ownership, immigration and labour issues, the back-to-the land movement, environmental protest and innovations in sustainability. The second section takes each major region in turn and looks into its history, growing conditions and varieties, as well as discussing the most significant and interesting producers. A final section looks at current themes in Californian wine and discusses the future of the industry across the state.

Today, we have Dr. James Buckley on the show. Dr. Buckley is an Associate Professor and Venerable Chair in Historic Preservation and the Director of the Historic Preservation Program at the University of Oregon, Portland. He has over twenty-five years of experience in the development of affordable housing in the Bay Area, including the adaptive reuse of several historic buildings for residential uses. Dr. Buckley previously taught at MIT and UC Berkeley and holds a Master’s degree in city planning and a Ph.D. in architectural history from UC Berkeley. He has been a member of the board of directors for the Vernacular Architecture Forum (VAF) and the Society of American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH).

City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry Dr. James Buckley

Here’s a description:

California’s 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the “instant city” of San Francisco as a base to exploit the rich natural resources of the American West. City of Wood examines how capitalists and workers logged the state’s vast redwood forests to create the financial capital and construction materials needed to build the regional metropolis of San Francisco. Architectural historian James Michael Buckley investigates the remote forest and its urban core as two poles of a regional “city.” This city consisted of a far-reaching network of spaces, produced as company owners and workers arrayed men and machines to extract resources and create human commodities from the region’s rich natural environment.

Combining labor, urban, industrial, and social history, City of Wood employs a variety of sources—including contemporary newspaper articles, novels, and photographs—to explore the architectural landscape of lumber, from backwoods logging camps and company towns in the woods to busy lumber docks and the homes of workers and owners in San Francisco. By imagining the redwood lumber industry as a single community spread across multiple sites—a “City of Wood”—Buckley demonstrates how capitalist resource extraction links different places along the production value chain. The result is a paradigm shift in architectural history that focuses not just on the evolution of individual building design across time, but also on economic connections that link the center and periphery across space.

Tony Platt is the author of thirteen books and 150 essays and articles on race, inequality, and social justice in American history, among them Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States; Bloodlines: Recovering Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, from Patton’s Trophy to Public Memorial; and The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency. His work has been translated into German, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. In addition to scholarly books and publications, Platt has written for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Truthdig, History News Network, Z Magazine, Nation, Salon, Monthly Review, and the Guardian, and his commentaries have aired on National Public Radio. Now a Distinguished Affiliated Scholar at Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society, Platt taught at the University of Chicago, the University of California, Berkeley, and California State University where he received awards for teaching and scholarship.

The focus of our conversation is Tony's new book The Scandal of Cal: Land Grabs, White Supremacy, and Miseducation at UC Berkeley.

Here's a description of the book:

The University of California, Berkeley—widely known as “Cal”—is admired worldwide as a bastion of innovation and a hub for progressive thought. Far less known are the university’s roots in plunder, warfare, and the promotion of white supremacy. As Tony Platt shows in The Scandal of Cal, these original sins sit at the center of UC Berkeley’s history. Platt looks unflinchingly at the university’s desecration of graves and large-scale hoarding of Indigenous remains. He tracks its role in developing the racist pseudoscience of eugenics in the early twentieth century. He sheds light on the school’s complicity with the military-industrial complex and its incubation of unprecedented violence through the Manhattan Project. And he underscores its deliberate and continued evasions about its own wrongdoings, which echo in the institution’s decision-making up to the present day. This book, above all, illuminates Cal’s culpability in some of the cruelest chapters of US history and sounds a clarion call for the university to undertake a thorough and earnest reckoning with its past. It is required reading for Cal alumni, students, faculty, and staff, and for anyone concerned with the impact of higher education in the United States and beyond.