HeyJaredHistory of California Podcast
The History of California Podcast is hosted by Jordan Mattox and explores the history of the state through narrative histories and in-depth conversations with experts.https://linktr.ee/historyofcapodcast
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 5
- Latest publication
- Sep 28, 2026
- Audience
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- Earliest in this view
- Aug 4, 2026
Latest episodes
185 - Podcast Updates and Dr. Iris Engstrand (opens the original)
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Today I'm doing something a little different. I'm re-releasing a conversation I recorded back in 2021 with Dr. Iris Engstrand, one of the great historians of California, who passed away on September 12th at the age of 91. Iris was a native Californian, born in Los Angeles in 1935. She earned her bachelor's, master's, and doctorate in history at the University of Southern California, where she wrote her dissertation on the scientific side of Spanish exploration in New Spain in the late 1700s. Tha
184 - Joseph Ogilvy, Tin Can Coast: A History of Industry, Greed, and Fishing in the Golden State (opens the original)
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In this episode of the History of California Podcast, host Jordan Mattox sits down with writer and chef Joseph Ogilvy to discuss his first book, Tin Can Coast: A History of Industry, Greed, and Fishing in the Golden State. Trained at Oxford and seasoned in restaurant kitchens in London and Austin, Ogilvy came to this history the hard way — gutting sardines, mackerel, and John Dory by the half-ton until a visceral question took hold: if that's what half a ton of fish feels like, what does eight h
183 - Dr. Jon Dawson, In Dubious Battle (opens the original)
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John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle (1936) is the coldest and most clinical of his California labor novels — the story of a fruit strike that offers no easy heroes and no comfort, only a chain of cause and effect grinding toward violence. It's also the book that established Steinbeck as an authority on farm labor and pointed him toward The Grapes of Wrath. Host Jordan Mattox is joined by Steinbeck scholar Dr. Jon Dawson to unpack the novel and the history beneath it: the real strikes at Tagus Ran
182 - John Langellier: Bastion by the Bay: The Many Lives of the Presidio of San Francisco (opens the original)
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Founded in 1776, the Presidio of San Francisco has served three nations, guarded the "harbor of harbors" for nearly 250 years, and evolved from a modest Spanish adobe fort into a Cold War missile site before becoming one of the country's most successful national parks. Historian John Langellier — former curator of the Presidio Army Museum and author of more than fifty books on the American West — joins Jordan to trace that remarkable arc, drawn from his new book Bastion by the Bay: The Presidio
181 - Dr. Daniel Rivers, California Futures: Haunted Ecologies, Decolonial Relations (opens the original)
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The grizzly on California's flag has been gone for a century — hunted to extinction in the very state that made it a symbol. What does it mean to build a mythology of abundance on top of a landscape of loss? In this episode, host Jordan Mattox sits down with Dr. Daniel Lanza Rivers of San José State University to dig beneath the Golden State's story of endless plenty. A scholar of environmental history, California studies, and settler colonialism, Rivers traces how a century and a half of promis
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