Southern Californians Research Articles

A Drink on the Terrace with Truus from Delft: Place Attachment at De Efteling Theme Park

Theme parks have been described by scholars as asocial and placeless, but recent research by McCarthy demonstrated that Southern Californians exhibit a strong sense of placement attachment and sociality at Disneyland. With the third highest attendance among theme parks in Europe, De Efteling in the Netherlands provides a congruent comparison to Disneyland since both parks were based in large measure on fairy tales, opened in the 1950s near two large metropolises, and mainly designed under the creative vision of one person. This study uses mixed methods of in-depth interviews, an online survey, and participant observation to determine the sense of place attachment within cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions for De Efteling by local fans and then compares the results with Disneyland. The findings indicate De Efteling fans exhibit place attachment across the three dimensions largely in alignment with McCarthy’s study on Disneyland, but also reveal key differences due to the nature and characteristics of the ownerships, theming, fans, and scales of operation of the two parks. This study not only further rebuts the long-held contention of theme parks as placeless and lacking sociality, but also calls for exploration and comparison with other global theme parks.

Review: In Pursuit of Utopia: Los Angeles in the Great Depression, by Errol Wayne Stevens

Historians of Los Angeles and Southern California have long observed that the region was an extraordinary place during the 1920s and 1930s. The region’s population and economy grew at a phenomenal rate. Evangelists called new arrivals to megachurches created by Hollywood set designers. Hundreds of thousands of Iowans flocked to annual picnics in Long Beach to celebrate their midwestern roots. Hucksters sold stocks for sham companies on the streets of downtown Los Angeles. As the Depression took hold and regional economic prospects spiraled downward, seemingly equally strange proposals and movements to solve the economic crisis and its corollary human suffering emerged and gained popularity, from the Ham and Eggs pension movement to Upton Sinclair’s gubernatorial campaign.In this carefully researched and thoughtfully written book, Errol Stevens asks the familiar question of why Los Angeles saw so many radical movements take hold in the 1930s. Over ten readable chapters, he rejects the common argument that Angelenos, many of them new migrants from the Midwest, naively fell for the impractical schemes of radicals and con artists. Instead, Stevens argues that Southern Californians, many of them desperate for feasible solutions to their abysmal economic situations, were willing to consider creative, even unusual, social and economic proposals to address personal and regional economic woes.As Stevens narrates, these programs and proposals varied widely. They included widespread agricultural self-help cooperatives that grew and distributed foodstuffs to thousands of members and those in need from Compton to El Monte. The Communist Party built a dedicated membership from its headquarters in Boyle Heights and in defiance of the Los Angeles Police Department’s “Red Squad.” Members of the newly formed Utopian Society advocated for a radical rethinking of the nation’s economic structure, a transformation that they believed could come about without revolution and would restore a solid middle class. Physician Francis E. Townsend proposed a wildly popular program of universal lifetime pensions of $150 a month for those over sixty or unemployed with the one stipulation that the money be spent in its entirety by the end of each month in order to stimulate the economy and end the Depression. At the urging of some prominent California Democrats, Sinclair, a longtime socialist, changed his party affiliation and announced his campaign for governor. His campaign, known as End Poverty in California (EPIC), organized over two thousand clubs across the state and helped add 350,000 new registered Democrats to the state’s voter rolls. Sinclair enjoyed tremendous popularity but state conservatives waged “one of the dirtiest campaigns in California history” against him and his Republican opponent won (p. 168).Ultimately, In Pursuit of Utopia explores why California’s “aging, churchgoing, largely conservative, midwestern” population flocked to “movements that advocated programs that would change the very nature of the capitalist system” (p. 197). Stevens finds that the region’s older midwestern transplant population turned to long-established midwestern agricultural traditions of communalism to make ends meet. They also responded to the real threats of homelessness and starvation, a complete absence of a federal social safety net, and the refusal of local officials to provide adequate relief by supporting novel and innovative proposals. As Stevens observes, “thousands of Southern Californians rushed to support these movements because there were no alternatives…in retrospect, it is clear that they were not pursuing utopia, just trying to survive” (p. 200).A historian and an archivist, Stevens spent the final two decades of his career as the director of the Department of Archives and Special Collections at Loyola Marymount University. While there, he also administered the Center for the Study of Los Angeles Research Collection. His training as an archivist is evident in this deeply researched and carefully sourced book. Sadly, the community of Los Angeles archivists and historians lost Stevens in 2020, but his contributions to the field live on in this finely researched and written book and in his stewardship of regional archival materials.

Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties

Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties

Return of the Jitneys: How Transportation Neoliberals Never Waste A Good Crisis

This article presents a history of jitneys from the Gilded Age streets until their return to discourse among post-1970s transportation neoliberals. Transportation neoliberals were an intellectual set including professors, policymakers, consultants, and con men. They discovered the history of jitneys, which Southern Californians invented during a wartime slump in global commerce in 1914. Abolished in the U.S., jitneys remained in operation in crisis-prone cities like Manila and Harare. Selective memories of jitneys in an age of austere state budgets contributed to the trade’s return as a cheap, unregulated alternative to public transit. History was the tool that led jitneys, in the guise of Lyft and Uber, back into U.S. streets after the global financial crisis.

Lawn Removal Motivation, Satisfaction, and Landscape Maintenance Practices of Southern Californians

Lawn Removal Motivation, Satisfaction, and Landscape Maintenance Practices of Southern Californians

Religiosity Among Young-Adult Baby Boomers: Associations With Psychological Well-Being Over 45 Years

Past studies on the influence of religiosity on psychological well-being tended to be cross-sectional in nature and neglected generational differences. In this study, we assess how religiosity in early adulthood (mean age = 19) affects baby-boomers’ psychological well-being over the life course. We used waves 1 to 9 or 45 years of survey data from the Longitudinal Study of Generations (LSOG) (N=798), a sample of Southern Californians. First, we used latent class analyses on five domains to identify three typologies of baby boomers’ religiosity in early adulthood. We call these typologies “strongly religious,” “weakly religious,” and “personally religious.” Then, we used latent growth curve modelling to ascertain the influence of these religiosity typologies on psychological wellbeing from waves 1 to 9, controlling for time-invariant (religious affiliation, age, sex, race, parental income) and varying (religious salience, education, marital status, and annual income) factors. We found that the strongly religious have a consistently upward psychological wellbeing trend throughout the study period whereas wellbeing started to decline for the weakly religious and personally religious at around wave 6, on when they were about mid-40s to almost 50. We provide evidence that religiosity in early adulthood – a period in life characterized by the exploration of various options for the future brought about by greater personal freedom – positively influences baby boomer’s psychological wellbeing over the life course.

Art as Advocacy: Protecting the U.S.-Mexico Border Environment in Amanda Keller Konya's "Specimens"

Amanda Keller-Konya's multilayered photographic image construction in "Specimens" from North America's Most Polluted River" helps the viewer perceive the magnitude of the damage sustained by US-Mexico's border area residents in California's Imperial Valley and the effort necessary to clean the area's New River. The river originates in Mexicali city, capital of Baja California, northwestern Mexico, crosses the border, flows north through California's Imperial Valley, and empties into the Salton Sea, the state's largest and most contaminated lake. A sustainable environment is crucial to the health of the valley's residents and farms that supply most of the nation's winter produce. Recovery of the area's ecosystem requires solving the impact of agricultural runoff and toxic dust as less water flows into the Salton Sea, a body of water vital for the wellbeing of Southern Californians, the fish, and the migratory birds that depend on it for survival.

The City of Angels/COVID California’s Center-Stage County

[Excerpt] I remember reading a comment in early June about how residents of Los Angeles were behaving as though we had all simply grown bored with the coronavirus that we collectively decided to start act like it no longer existed. This theory seemed plausible, when on every street families could be seen walking around without face masks and young adults were suddenly socializing again in close physical proximity to others who clearly were not members of their households. Bars, beaches, and gyms began to reopen as Southern Californians seemed eager above all else to “get back to normal.” On June 24, however, with more than 88,500 residents diagnosed, Los Angeles officially become the county with the highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States (Gutman et al, 2020). Furthermore, as of June 22, the U.S. itself was currently registering the highest number of deaths from COVID-19, despite accounting for only 4% of the world’s population (Elflein, 2020).

End-of-Dinner Food Offering: A Three-Way Contrastive Study

Abstract This paper presents a three-way contrastive study of the structure of the end-of-dinner food offering event – hosts asking guests to eat more food when the latter have indicated that they have finished eating – across three population groups: Chinese residents of the City of Xi’an as of 1995 (as reported in Chen, 1996), American residents of Southern California as of 2019, and Chinese residents of Xi’an as of 2019. It is found that, in 2019, Americans living in Southern California only infrequently offer their guests more food at the end of a dinner, while the Chinese residents of Xi’an (the Xi’an Chinese) offer their guests food much less often than in 1995, although still more frequently than their American counterparts. The difference observed between the Chinese and American groups is attributed to the different notions of politeness that are held in the two cultures: the Xi’an Chinese still maintain elements of hospitality and warmth as key notions of politeness, in a similar way to Libyan Arabic speakers, as discovered by Grainger, Mansor and Mills (2015), while the offering behaviour of Southern Californians is motivated by the respect they hold for another person’s freedom of action. The noticeable change in the way food is offered at the end of a Chinese dinner between 1995 and 2019 – which can be seen to be a process of ‘deritualisation’ (Kádár, 2013) – is due to the influence of Western cultures. The significance of our work thus goes beyond the understanding of both food offering in Chinese and Chinese politeness: it adds to the scant literature on the structure of the offering event across cultures and places Chinese politeness in the context of other languages; it brings insights from language contact into the field of pragmatics, a decades-long research paradigm; and it demonstrates the value of diachronic contrastive pragmatics, a direction that will no doubt aid the advancement of contrastive pragmatics in particular and, as a consequence, pragmatics in general.

Introduction

Introduction Rika Hiro (bio) The purpose of this section, "Japan Housed in LA," is to highlight instances of "Japan"—its artwork, design, presentation, and at times mispresentation found in Los Angeles. Dianne Lee Shen's case study of Yamashiro, a 1911 castle-style private estate in the Hollywood Hills, historicizes Southern Californians' fascination with Japan and various things Japanese as an example of Hollywood Japonisme in the early twentieth century. Shen's study is juxtaposed with contemporary examples of "Japan" housed in the city nearly a century later at JAPAN HOUSE Los Angeles, which has been launched by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs to showcase "the very best" of Japanese arts and culture along with two other locations in London and São Paulo.1 Izumita Yukiya's (2017) ceramic work and Utagawa Hiroshige's Foxfire at Ōji (1857), from the renowned series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, were included in exhibitions that Hollis Goodall and Meher McArthur, respectively, curated for JAPAN HOUSE Los Angeles in 2019 and 2021. Goodall's exhibition KESHIKI attempts to locate Japanese landscape condensed as or appearing within objects in fired clay. In contrast, Foxfire at Ōji, which is drawn from the collection of Hiroshige's prints at Scripps College's Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, shares the historical context of the art and artifacts displayed at Yamashiro. In the final part of this section, Southern California-based artist Bruce Yonemoto's (b. 1949) conceptual presentation of export ware from the Occupation period emblematically merges America in Japan and Japan in America. [End Page 131] Rika Hiro Rika Hiro is a Visiting Assistant Professor, Occidental College, California. Her doctoral dissertation looked at the aftereffects of the atomic bombs in arts and exhibition culture in postwar Japan. She co-founded the non-profit art space Art2102 of Los Angeles and co-curated Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan 1950–1970 and Radical Communication: Japanese Video Art, 1968–1988 at the Getty Research Institute. She is currently researching Japanese diaspora artists in mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles with a fellowship of the DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion. (rikahiro@gmail.com) Note 1. "Project Vision," JAPAN HOUSE Los Angeles, https://www.japanhousela.com/aboutus/ (accessed August 10, 2021). Copyright © 2022 Review of Japanese Culture and Society

FUTURES OF GAMING: HOW CASINOS AND GAMBLING MIGHT EVOLVE IN THE NEAR FUTURE

FUTURES OF GAMING: HOW CASINOS AND GAMBLING MIGHT EVOLVE IN THE NEAR FUTURE

‘Meet me on main street’: Disneyland as place attachment for Southern Californians

Disneyland is often cited by scholars as a pseudo-place, non-place and placeless, but the approximately one million annual passholders in Southern California hold a strong sense of place attachment to the first and only park built by Walt Disney. The particular environmental, cultural, business and personal factors behind Disneyland’s development and evolution have produced a special connection between locals and theme park. Manzo and Perkins’s (2006) three psychological processes of place attachment illustrate the affective, cognitive and behavioral dimensions of the Southern Californian bond to Disneyland’s social and physical features based on qualitative data from interviews with event and group organizers, and two months of participant observation fieldwork at Disneyland, in addition to quantitative data from an online survey of 637 Disneyland fans in Southern California. Without the prodding, involvement or permit of the Disney corporation, Southern Californians have organically created hundreds of their own events, meets and clubs in the park. Disneyland is not placeless as typically insinuated, but rather a meaningful place for many Southern Californians who perceive the park as their primary social hub to meet family, friends and strangers, a home away from home, an anchor to the region and a force for good in American society to be protected and cherished by assisting other visitors and cast members, picking up trash, reporting lost items and enjoying camaraderie with fellow Disney enthusiasts. Though pleasure gardens, mechanical amusement parks and theme parks have long been derided as vacuous, antisocial spaces of ephemeral engagement, Disneyland for Southern Californians demonstrates otherwise. The original Disneyland is perhaps a localized Southern California place phenomenon and not representative of other Disneylands and theme park milieus around the world, though further research is necessary.

Secular Trends of Overweight and Obesity in Young Southern Californians 2008-2013

To investigate secular trends in pediatric obesity in Southern California between 2008 and 2013. In a population-based cohort study, measured weight and height were extracted from electronic health records of 1,331,931 patients aged 2-19 years who were enrolled in an integrated prepaid health plan between 2008 and 2013. Outcomes were the prevalence of overweight and obesity (body mass index-for-age ≥85th percentile). The prevalence of obesity was 19.1% in 2008 and decreased by 1.6% (95% CI, 1.7%-1.5%) by 2013, corresponding to a relative decline of 8.4%. A significant decline was observed across all ages, sexes, races, and socioeconomic groups, but the magnitude of the decrease varied. The relative decline in obesity was stronger in boys (-9.3%) than in girls (-7.2%), in children aged 2-5 years (-15.4%) and 6-11 years (-11.8%) than in adolescents aged 12-19 years (-4.5%), and in whites (-12.6%) and Asians (-12.2%) than in Hispanics (-6.9%) and African Americans (-7.5%). Secular trends from this large population-based cohort suggest that overweight and obesity in boys and girls are declining across age and racial/ethnic groups. However, the declines are less pronounced in adolescents compared with children, in girls, and in some minority groups. Programs addressing childhood obesity may need to be targeted.

The Golden State in the Civil War: Thomas Starr King, the Republican Party, and the Birth of Modern California by Glenna Matthews (review)

Reviewed by: The Golden State in the Civil War: Thomas Starr King, the Republican Party, and the Birth of Modern California by Glenna Matthews Jacob F. Lee The Golden State in the Civil War: Thomas Starr King, the Republican Party, and the Birth of Modern California. Glenna Matthews. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. ISBN 978-1-107-63921-8, 272 pp., paper, $25.99. Glenna Matthews's new book offers an important reminder that the crisis of Union stretched beyond the battlefields in the East. As was the case in most of the North, the Union and Confederate armies never fought each other on California soil, but the political, economic, and cultural changes that accompanied the war affected the Golden State no less than they did the rest of the Union. Those transformations, Matthews argues, created "modern California" as the state became more integrated into the Union through the era's new nationalism and the construction of transportation and communication links between East and West. In Matthews's telling, the Civil War history of California, usually noted simply as a free, Union state, becomes a complex narrative that will be familiar to historians knowledgeable about other Union states with substantial pro-Confederate populations. California may have been a free state by law, but several hundred black slaves labored in gold mines. In the 1850s, southern émigrés controlled state politics, and two of California's U.S. senators owned slaves in their home [End Page 104] states, Mississippi and North Carolina, and sided with the Confederacy after the outbreak of the war. Even after the Republican victories in the election of 1860, the state's politicians tended to side with the conservative wing of the party, and many southern Californians became antiwar, anti-emancipation Copperheads as the war progressed. Still, California remained loyal to the Union, and the state offered irreplaceable support for the Union war effort, shipping $100 million in gold to northeastern banks and donating more money than any other state to the U.S. Sanitary Commission. As in much of the U.S. West, Californians' enthusiasm for the war was disastrous for Native peoples. With no rebels to fight, California militia and the state's nearly seventeen thousand Union army enlistees funneled their wartime patriotism into massacring Indians in California and neighboring territories. Universalist minister Thomas Starr King plays a central role in Matthews's account of California's Civil War years. Born and educated in Massachusetts, King moved to San Francisco in 1860, arriving at a moment that proved crucial in shaping California's future. In that election year, the state's Republican party was growing in popularity, and King joined the campaign that handed Lincoln California's electoral votes. King's rise to prominence in California and his connections to leading writers and activists in the East gave him a central role in steering the state toward a pro-Union course. During the war, King used his oratorical skills to raise money for the Sanitary Commission, helping San Francisco procure $200,000 in donations in September 1862 alone. Just as significantly, in Matthews's view, King introduced northern cultural ideals to California while drawing New Englanders' interest to the state. Matthews interprets King as a cultural broker who linked the two coasts of the United States in "a transcontinental cultural system" (149). While Matthews's focus on California breaks the usual geographic boundaries placed on the study of the Civil War, she adheres to an older chronology that proves detrimental to her work. Although her introduction acknowledges the close link between Reconstruction in the South and events in the West, she only briefly acknowledges the war's post-1865 denouement. As a result, The Golden State in the Civil War offers a cursory account of California's place in the post-war debates over race and citizenship. California's diverse population of Anglos, Californios, Asians, blacks, and Indians contrasted with the dichotomous race relations of the eastern United States, but the state experienced a similar postwar backlash against emancipation and the Republican party. More discussion of the years immediately following the war, including the failure of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in California, would...

The Incidence of Clinically Isolated Syndrome Is Higher in African Americans and Whites Compared with Hispanics and Asians (P01.140)

Objective: To determine whether the incidence of clinically isolated syndrome (CIS) the precursor form of multiple sclerosis (MS) that encompasses optic neuritis and transverse myelitis as well as other clinical presentations, varies by race/ethnicity in a multi-ethnic, population-based cohort. Background We previously reported that the incidence of MS was higher in blacks than whites, Hispanics and Asians. Design/Methods: We used electronic record searches and complete medical records review to identify all newly diagnosed CIS and MS cases in the population-based, multiethnic membership of Southern California Kaiser Permanente (KPSC) between 2008 and 2009. The KPSC membership contributed 7,410,754 person-years of observation during the study period and the racial/ethnic distribution was 36.5% white, 8.6% black, 43.4% Hispanic, 9.3% Asian/Pacific Islanders (Asian/PI) and 1.9% other. Results: We identified 254 incident cases of CIS cases who did not yet met McDonald criteria for MS and did not have other obvious causes (e.g. viral, lupus, ischemia). The most common clinical presentation was optic neuritis (48.4%) followed by transverse myelitis (32.7%), other forms of mono-regional CIS (9.8%) and poly-regional CIS (9.1%). The average age at diagnosis with CIS was 42.9 years (range 14.8-80.8) and 70.5% were women. Among CIS cases, the racial/ethnic distribution was 47.6% white, 12.6% black, 33.1% Hispanic, 4.3% Asian/PI and 2.4% other. The incidence of CIS was 3.4 per 100,000 person-years. Incidence of CIS was higher in black (5.1, 95%CI=3.5-7.1) and white, non-Hispanic individuals (4.5, 95%CI=3.7-5.3) compared with white, Hispanic (2.6, 95%CI=2.1-3.2) and Asian/PI individuals (1.6, 95%CI=0.8-2.9; p Conclusions: The incidence of CIS is 3.4 per 100,000 person-years in a multi-ethnic, population-based cohort of Southern Californians. The incidence of CIS is higher in black and white individuals compared with Hispanic and Asian/PI individuals. Incidence rates standardized to the US census by age and gender will be presented at the meeting. Disclosure: Dr. Langer-Gould has nothing to disclose. Dr. Brara has nothing to disclose. Dr. Beaber has nothing to disclose. Dr. Zhang has nothing to disclose.

Sub-phonemic correlates of gender and regional identity in California

Given that the Northern and Southern California have large metropolitan areas geographically and culturally separated from each other, it is to be expected that each is developing a unique linguistic identity. Despite a handful of ethnographic studies showing otherwise (e.g., Hall-Lew 2009), the West has generally been lumped into a single dialect region (Labov etal. 2006). This paper presents data showing sub-phonemic differences between the regions that break along gender lines. Vowel productions from 14 (female = 8) Northern Californians (NCs) and 15 (female = 8) Southern Californians (SCs) were analyzed for regional differences in normalized vowel quality, voice quality (spectral tilt), pitch, and duration. No major differences in vowel quality were found. However, interactions were found between region and gender for duration and voice quality. Specifically, NC females had significantly longer word durations than NC males, with no difference between genders for SC. For voice quality, H1-H2 and H1-A3 measures both demonstrated significant differences between males and females for SC, with female voices being breathier, but with no differences for NC. Currently, a perception experiment is underway to determine if listeners can use these differences to categorize voices by region.

The Japanese village and deer park

Not so long ago, Orange County, California, played host to a unique landscape, the Japanese Village and Deer Park. From 1967 to 1974 this diminutive theme park provided southern Californians with a...

The Frontier of Leisure in California and the Shaping of Modern America (review)

Reviewed by: The Frontier of Leisure in California and the Shaping of Modern America William Philpott The Frontier of Leisure in California and the Shaping of Modern America. By Lawrence Culver. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. x + 317 pages, $29.95. Click for larger view View full resolution Anaheim Public Library, Bookmobile, Interior View. Ca. 1960. Photograph. Accession #P1756. Courtesy of the Anaheim Public Library. Depicted here is the first bookmobile operated by the Anaheim Public Library, purchased in 1958. The history of the bookmobile in the United States began with a horse and wagon at the Washington County Free Library in Hagerstown, Maryland; during the 1950s and '60s, bookmobiles proliferated with an increase in literacy and a decentralization of the reading public. [End Page 326] "Ranch houses suit any climate," declared House Beautiful in 1947. With its rambling, casual floor plan and its sliding doors and patios blurring outdoors and in, the ranch house might epitomize sunny Southern California, but it was equally at home in Connecticut or Illinois, the author of the article insisted (House Beautiful, January 1947, 61). For the ranch, more than just a house style, was "a Way of Living," a means of "planning house and site together" to achieve comfort, privacy, and "outdoor living in any season anywhere" (House Beautiful 66, 61, 66). This idea—that Southern California spawned not just a style but a lifestyle, premised on outdoor recreation in the privacy of one's own yard and home—is the core of Lawrence Culver's new monograph. We have long needed a history of Southern California's distinctive culture of leisure and its consequences, and now in this superb book we have it. A richness of recent scholarship has illuminated Southern California's cultural, racial, political, and environmental histories. Culver breaks new ground by revealing the central role leisure played in all of them. Leisure drove Southern California's growth from the late nineteenth century on as boosters promised tourists and new residents alike a relaxed, pastoral retreat from the East's urban chaos. Leisure reshaped environmental attitudes when Southern Californians learned to value nature more for personal pleasure than for national greatness or resource wealth, and leisure molded architecture and planning, as houses, yards, and subdivisions were designed to give homeowners their own private recreational spaces. Key to Culver's argument, leisure helped define social difference—including the very idea of "whiteness" in a racially diverse region—as these private, backyard leisure spaces took precedence over public ones and people of color found themselves barred from both. And not least, leisure catalyzed a significant social and political shift when consumers came to value their private recreational domains over community and collective enterprise. In short, leisure forged a world of equal parts "opportunity and oppression, happiness and hardship" (3); one of this book's great strengths is that Culver refuses to cast it in simplistic black-or-white terms. Especially after World War II, this culture of leisure would spread beyond Southern California, becoming America's middle-class, suburban culture writ large. Not a comprehensive history of Southern California leisure, Culver's book instead focuses on several pivotal people and places. Readers of this journal should especially appreciate his chapter on Charles Fletcher Lummis, the turn-ofthe-century author whose self-professed "scholarly" writings on the scenery and Native cultures of the Southwest helped make Los Angeles a major tourist destination. [End Page 327] Here Culver links Southern California's recreational rise to the longer history of American conquest in the Southwest, as Anglo boosters like Lummis relegated indigenous Mexicans and Indians to a romantic, idyllic past while also expecting them to work in the present so whites might play. Another chapter considers the history of recreational segregation in Los Angeles. Though leisure anchored LA's civic identity, Culver shows, the city and county prioritized private over public recreation and strove to exclude nonwhites from what little public park and beach space there was. African Americans, in particular, fought back, claiming and creating recreational settings for themselves. But LA's legacy would be one of recreational reinforcing of residential segregation, a sad blueprint for suburbia in the rest of America. Two...

The frontier of leisure: Southern California and the shaping of modern America

Southern California has long been promoted as the playground of the world, the home of resort-style living, backyard swimming pools, and year-round suntans. Tracing the history of Southern California from the late nineteenth century through the late twentieth century, The Frontier of Leisure reveals how this region did much more than just create lavish resorts like Santa Catalina Island and Palm Springs-it literally remade American attitudes towards leisure. Lawrence Culver shows how this culture of gradually took hold with an increasingly broad group of Americans, and ultimately manifested itself in suburban developments throughout the Sunbelt and across the United States. He further shows that as Southern Californians promoted resort-style living, they also encouraged people to turn inward, away from public spaces and toward their private homes and communities. Impressively researched, a fascinating and lively read, this finely nuanced history connects Southern Californian recreation and leisure to larger historical themes, including regional development, architecture and urban planning, race relations, Indian policy, politics, suburbanization, and changing perceptions of nature.

Preparing for a “Big One”: The Great Southern California ShakeOut

The Great Southern California ShakeOut was a week of special events featuring the largest earthquake drill in United States history. On November 13, 2008, over 5 million Southern Californians pretended that the magnitude-7.8 ShakeOut scenario earthquake was occurring and practiced actions derived from results of the ShakeOut Scenario, to reduce the impact of a real, San Andreas Fault event. The communications campaign was based on four principles: 1) consistent messaging from multiple sources; 2) visual reinforcement: 3) encouragement of “milling”; and 4) focus on concrete actions. The goals of the ShakeOut established in Spring 2008 were: 1) to register 5 million people to participate in the drill; 2) to change the culture of earthquake preparedness in Southern California; and 3) to reduce earthquake losses in Southern California. Over 90% of the registrants surveyed the next year reported improvement in earthquake preparedness at their organization as a result of the ShakeOut.