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.
Asian American basketball leagues have given shape to the unique histories of each ethnic group living under the flattening designation of "Asian American."
For Japanese Americans, baseball played a critical role in shaping an ethnic identity and promoting civil rights.
The bohemian aesthetic of the "bungalow boom" gave way to the ranch house, as popularized by architect Cliff May, the "Father of American Ranch Houses."
In the early twentieth century, the bungalow dominated bourgeoisie and working class visions of the American dream, and Southern California's climate and landscape provided the perfect setting for the bungalow's expansion.
Even with the clearest of minds, personal and historical memory ebb and flow. Recollections of our own past and that of the society around us often become…
Handful of early film noirs placed mothers and women at their center, pushing back against noir restraints, but still reinforcing domestic, gender, and racial normatives of the day.
Fuller's 1959 film took a very different approach from other film noir of the 1950s, and serves as useful text from which to consider changes to the genre and Southern California's racial dynamics.
Noir made L.A. the city intellectuals loved to hate, yet perversely for European intellects, notably those hailing from France and Britain, this only deepened the fascination.
The bowling alley, which was demolished in 2003, served as an integrated leisure space where African, Mexican, and Asian Americans could interact.
Los Angeles of the 1920s remained a segregated landscape, many neighborhoods boasted a diverse non-white population consisting of Latino, Asian, African American faces.
Some of L.A.'s most important history lay in the periphery, in towns like El Monte and South El Monte. But how do we excavate and broadcast its important history?
Malibu is the wildfire capital of North America and, possibly, the world, but residents continue to have a love affair with the beachfront area.