Ryan Reft
Ryan Reft is a historian of 20th and 21st-century American history at the Library of Congress. His work has appeared in several journals, including Souls, The Sixties, California History, Planning Perspectives, Southern California Quarterly, and the Journal of Urban History, as well as in the anthology "Barack Obama and African American Empowerment: The Rise of Black America's New Leadership" and "Asian American Sporting Cultures." The opinions expressed by Reft are solely his and not those of the Library of Congress. He can be reached on twitter at @ryanreft.
California surfers have been especially active in environmentalism, much of which can be attributed to the efforts of pioneering women surfers.
In post-war Southern California, Japanese Americans created the built environment as much as much as anyone else, and few suburbs demonstrate Asian American agency like South Bay's Gardena.
The 2010 Parent Trigger controversy provides a valuable window into the city's education history, the evolution of its Latino-African American relations, and the new political reality of today's "City of Compton."
Few events reveal the impact of shifting San Fernando Valley demographics like the unsuccessful 2002 secession campaign which, even though it ended in failure, revealed startlingly new political currents in the Valley.
Without Japanese and Mexican American labor, the Valley's image of "whiteness" would not have been possible.
While popular culture has long obscured women's role in the sport, California and female surfers have intertwined to spread surfing not only past national boundaries, but also gender and racial equality.
Bruce's Beach and the Inkwell served as sites of leisure, agency, community, and controversy, and demonstrate the complex racial history of the Golden State.
Popular culture has long portrayed surfing as a sort of reservoir of bohemian, along with a large helping of agro-masculinity and whiteness. Yet, if one traces its origins you find a much more complicated story.
While undoubtedly influential and important, Northern California's Silicon Valley's rise rests heavily on its Southern California predecessor -- Caltech. Even today, this history remains obscured.
Before and after 1972 when Title IX radically altered American sport, California and its female athletes have been and continue to be a forerunner regarding issues of gender, race, and sexuality.
Baseball enabled Mexican Americans to create connections that helped buoy working class communities, and even contributed to unionization efforts amid widespread discrimination.
At home in the U.S. and abroad, basketball continues to occupy a central place in Filipino American lives.