California Government

California Government and Politics: An Introductory Primer to California Government provides a basic understanding of the history and modern practice of California government and politics. This book stands as an independent resource for teaching California politics or a compliment to most introduction to political science classes at the university level.

The #1 USA Today Bestseller and Instant New York Times Bestseller From California Governor Gavin Newsom comes an intimate and poignant account of identity, belonging, and the defining moments that inspired a life in politics “Go slow,” his political elders advised him, but Gavin Newsom has...

ECONOMIC WAR IS DECLARED ON THE UNITED STATES by a cabal of foreign interests. Napoleon Hancock and his covert team determine that the drought in California is in fact man made. They find that weather-altering technology has been used to limit rainfall on the west coast of America. They follow the elusive trail across the Middle East and back to California. In the course of their thrilling investigation the team discovers a magnificent civilization and amazing technologies that existed thousands of years earlier in California. The secrets of this lost civilization may hold answers for the ...

The fog doesn't hide the truth. It just makes the truth harder to prove. Nolan Cross has spent his career preserving other people's secrets. As a senior archivist at the California State Archives in Sacramento, he catalogs the past with the same careful distance he keeps from everything else in his life. Then a federal judge presses a flash drive into his hand — and turns up murdered the next morning. The drive contains fifteen years of buried evidence: thirty-seven Delta landowners stripped of their properties, fourteen people imprisoned for crimes they never committed, five people dead....

Between 1846 and 1873, California's Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Benjamin Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter, the involvement of state and federal officials, the taxpayer dollars that supported the violence, indigenous resistance, who did the killing, and why the killings ended. This deeply researched book is a comprehensive and chilling history of an American genocide.

A vivid, searching journey into California's capture of water and soil—the epic story of a people's defiance of nature and the wonders, and ruin, it has wrought Mark Arax is from a family of Central Valley farmers, a writer with deep ties to the land who has watched the battles over water...

Nick Neely chronicles his 650-mile trek on foot from San Diego to San Francisco, following the route of the first overland Spanish expedition into what was soon called Alta California. Led by Gaspar de Portolá in 1769, the expedition sketched a route that would become, in part, the famous El Camino Real. It laid the foundation for the Golden State we know today, a place that remains as mythical and captivating as any in the world.

Before the sky was mapped and owned, the impossible was seen over the Golden State. It began in 1896 with a mysterious airship gliding over Sacramento, decades before human flight was thought possible. This was only the beginning. This meticulously researched account unveils a century of startling eyewitness reports, from the wonder-filled sightings of the 19th century to the tense, modern-day encounters documented by military personnel. Journey through a hidden history of unexplained aerial phenomena, declassified government files, and the persistent rumors of recovered otherworldly ...

What if the skies above us are no longer the untouched masterpiece of nature — but a controlled system quietly altered by human hands? For generations, we believed weather was beyond our influence. Today, science has shattered that illusion. From cloud seeding across drought-stricken California to global proposals for controlling sunlight with stratospheric aerosols, geoengineering has rapidly moved from theoretical concept to urgent international debate. Our climate — and our health — may already be part of a grand, unspoken experiment. Weather by Design pulls back the veil on one of...

An investigation that shows how the most ambitious figures in the Democratic Party want to transform the rest of America into the progressive dystopia that is California. Take a close look at today’s Democratic Party power brokers and you’ll quickly realize most of them share one thing in...

In this exceptional cultural history, Atlantic Senior Editor Ronald Brownstein—“one of America's best political journalists (The Economist)—tells the kaleidoscopic story of one monumental year that marked the city of Los Angeles’ creative peak, a glittering moment when popular culture...

In this pulse-pounding thriller from bestselling writer Chris Carter, criminal behavior psychologist turned LAPD detective Robert Hunter finds himself engaged in a brutal game to the finish with a ruthless opponent. But no matter what moves Hunter makes, death is coming…. At the Los Angeles...

In The Browns of California, journalist and scholar Miriam Pawel weaves a narrative history that spans four generations, from August Schuckman, the Prussian immigrant who crossed the Plains in 1852 and settled on a northern California ranch, to his great-grandson Jerry Brown, who reclaimed the family homestead 140 years later. Through the prism of their lives, we gain an essential understanding of California and an appreciation of its importance.

A Time 100 Must-Read Book of 2020 A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice California Book Award Silver Medal in Nonfiction Finalist for The New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism Named a top 30 must-read Book of 2020 by the New York...

Originally meant to be brief and exceptional, solitary confinement in US prisons has become long-term and common. Prisoners spend 23 hours a day in featureless cells, with no visitors or human contact for years on end, and they are held entirely at administrators' discretion. Keramet Reiter tells the history of one "supermax", California's Pelican Bay State Prison, whose extreme conditions recently sparked a statewide hunger strike by 30,000 prisoners.

From award-winning, New York Times bestselling novelist Ben H. Winters comes a mind-bending novel set in a world governed by absolute truth, where lies are as dangerous as murder. In a strange alternate society that values law and truth above all else, Laszlo Ratesic is a nineteen-year veteran...

Young countercultural back-to-the-land settlers flocked to northwestern California beginning in the 1960s, and by the 1970s, unregulated cannabis production proliferated on Indigenous lands. As of 2021, the California cannabis economy was valued at $3.5 billion. In Settler Cannabis, Kaitlin Reed demonstrates how this "green rush" is only the most recent example of settler colonial resource extraction and wealth accumulation. Reed shares this history to inform the path toward an alternative future.

Sam Dryden lives quietly in a small coastal town in southern California, buying and fixing up old houses. It's good physical work that he's come to love. But his peaceful life is shattered when he gets a phone call from an old friend in trouble. A phone call that pulls Dryden into the middle of...

“Mesmerizing and haunting.”—Lisa Gardner “T. Jefferson Parker is the poet of American crime fiction, and The Room of White Fire absolutely proves why.”—C.J. Box In this stirring thriller from New York Times bestseller and award winner T. Jefferson Parker, P.I. Roland Ford must...

On April 10, 1966, a crowd of 10,000 farm workers and supporters gathered at the California state capitol to celebrate victory in one of the most significant strikes in American history - one that made Cesar Chavez famous as leader of the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), which later became the United Farm Workers (UFW). Marshall Ganz tells the story of the UFW's ground-breaking victory, drawing out larger lessons from this dramatic tale.