1. David Brody, "Labor History in the 1970s: Toward a History of the American Worker," and Peter N. Stearns, "Toward a Wider Vision: Trends in Social History," both in The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States , ed. Michael Kammen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 205-230, 252-269.

2. One of those critical of "the romantic view of California history so often enshrined in the textbooks and popular literature of a generation ago" and calling for a broader social history of California is Charles Wollenberg ("A Usable History for a Multicultural State," California History 74 [Summer 1985]: 203-209).

3. These four books by Carey McWilliams are Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Boston: Little, Brown, 1939); Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946); North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1949); and California: The Great Exception (New York: A. A. Wyn, 1949). In addition, McWilliams's book Brothers Under the Skin (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943) was reprinted in 1964.

4. Carey McWilliams, The Education of Carey McWilliams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), pp. 66, 84, 100.

5. Michael Kazin, "The Great Exception Revisited: Organized Labor and Politics in San Francisco and Los Angeles, 1870-1940," Pacific Historical Review 55 (August 1986): 371-402.

6. Roger Daniels and Spencer C. Olin, Jr., eds., Racism in California: A Reader in the History of Oppression (New York: Macmillan, 1971); George E. Frakes and Curtis B. Solberg, eds., Minorities in California History (New York: Random House, 1971); Robert F. Heizer and Alan F. Almquist, The Other Californians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Roger Olmsted and Charles Wollenberg, eds., Neither Separate nor Equal: Race and Racism in California (San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1971).

7. Jackson K. Putnam, "The Gilded Age and Progressivism, 1880-1930," in A Guide to the History of California , ed. Doyce B. Nunis, Jr., and Gloria Ricci Lothrop (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1989), p. 35.

8. For a critical evaluation of the major general works in California history from Bancroft to the rash of California history textbooks that began appearing in the 1960s, see Gerald D. Nash, "California and Its Historians: An Appraisal of the Histories of the State," Pacific Historical Review 50 (August 1981): 387-413. Nash's overall assessment of the recent general works is somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, he notes California historians' "emphasis on the uniqueness of California's experience"; on the other, he praises these historians for avoiding "parochialism" and for viewing "their subject in a broad perspective.'' At the same time, he notes that "California still lacks a comprehensive history of business, agriculture, or labor,'' not to mention "a comprehensive history of politics."

9. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), p. 21.

10. Richard B. Rice, William A. Bullough, and Richard J. Orsi, The Elusive Eden: A New History of California (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), p. 3. The prologue to this book, "Californians and Their History: Myths and Realities," offers a sweeping attack on the traditional approaches to California history.

11. McWilliams, California: The Great Exception .

12. Rice, Bullough, and Orsi, Elusive Eden , p. 4.

13. McWilliams, Factories in the Field , p. 4.

14. Ira B. Cross, A History of the Labor Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1935), p. xi.

15. Howard Kimeldorf, "Bringing Unions Back In (Or Why We Need a New Old Labor History)," Labor History 32 (Winter 1991): 91-103. In responses to this article in the same issue of Labor History , some historians took issue with Kimeldorf, but most agreed that union movement history was important and believed that the move to bring unions back in had developed further than Kimeldorf acknowledged. It is worth noting that, in part, Kimeldorf's major work to date has been on the California labor movement; see Kimeldorf, Reds or Rackets? The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

16. This point is made in Philip Taft, Labor Politics American Style: The California State Federation of Labor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968); in Michael Kazin, Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); and in Daniel Cornford, Workers and Dissent in the Redwood Empire (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987).

17. Kazin, Barons of Labor , esp. chap. 6 (reprinted here); and Cornford, Workers and Dissent , chap. 8.

18. Taft states that "its regular annual income in the early decades seldom exceeded $5000 and was frequently below this amount" ( Labor Politics American Style , p. 3).

19. On the power of employer organizations in California labor relations, see William Issel and Robert W. Cherny, San Francisco, 1865-1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and William Issel, "Business Power and Political Culture in San Francisco, 1900-1940," Journal of Urban History 16 (November 1989): 52-77.

20. Lucile Eaves, A History of California Labor Legislation, with an Introductory Sketch of the San Francisco Labor Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1910); Gerald D. Nash, "The Influence of Labor on State Policy, 1860-1920: The Experience of California," California Historical Society Quarterly 42 (September 1963): 241-257; Taft, Labor Politics American Style .

21. Taft's book Labor Politics American Style , while in some respects a brief for the AFL, provides useful information on this much-neglected topic. See also Marilynn S. Johnson's essay in this volume and her book The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

22. Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 152. Several useful articles and chapters on California Populism have been written, but we still lack a monograph on the subject. Michael Magliari's work provides an excellent, broad overview of California Populism in a well-researched and very insightful case study; see Magliari, "California Populism, a Case Study: The Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party in San Luis Obispo County, 1885-1903" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Davis, 1992).

23. Jackson Putnam's book Old-Age Politics in California: From Richardson to Reagan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970) is still a valuable work on this subject. Royce D. Delmatier, Clarence F. McIntosh, and Earl G. Waters, The Rumble of California Politics, 1848-1970 (New York: John Wiley, 1970), the standard California political history, is useful but in need of updating.

24. James N. Gregory, "Who Voted for Upton Sinclair? The EPIC Campaign of 1934" (paper delivered at the Southwest Labor Studies Association Conference, San Francisco, April 29, 1989).

25. On synthesizing the new and the old labor history, see David Brody, "Reconciling the Old Labor History and the New," Pacific Historical Review 62 (February 1993): 1-18. See also the responses to the Kimeldorf article cited in note 15.

26. Herbert G. Gutman, "Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America," American Historical Review 78 (1973): 531-587.

27. Sherburne F. Cook, The Conflict Between the California Indian and White Civilization: The Indian Versus the Spanish Mission , Ibero-Americana, no. 21 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943); Sherburne E Cook, The Conflict Between the California Indian and White Civilization: The American Invasion, 1848-1870 , Ibero-Americana, no. 23 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943).

28. Albert L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2988), pp. 7, 218.

29. Works by George Phillips include Chiefs and Challengers: Indian Resistance and Cooperation in Southern California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); and The Enduring Struggle: Indians in California History (San Francisco: Boyd and Fraser, 1981).

30. James J. Rawls, Indians of California: The Changing Image (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984); Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968).

31. Useful overviews of Chicanos in California are provided in the following books: Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in California: A History of Mexican Americans in California (San Francisco: Boyd and Fraser, 1984); Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (New York: Harper Collins, 1988); and Mario Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979).

32. Vicki L. Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987); Patricia Zavella, Women's Work and Chicano Families: Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).

33. Accounts have tended to be of a rather narrative nature. Recent and useful are J. Craig Jenkins, The Politics of Insurgency: The Farm Workers Movement in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Linda C. Majka and Theo J. Majka, Farm Workers, Agribusiness, and the State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Margaret Rose, "'From the Field to the Picket Line: Huelga Women and the Boycott,' 1965-1975," Labor History 31 (Summer 1990): 271-293. Forthcoming from the University of Oklahoma Press is Richard A. Garcia and Richard Griswold del Castillo, Cesar Chavez: His Life and Times .

34. Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860-1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 2-3. Min-nick is openly critical of a generation of scholars who found it "easier to write Chinese and ethnic history by fanning an angry flame, delineating the victims and the exploiters." In this approach, she argues, the Chinese were portrayed as "a hapless lot and devoid of spirit," while ''their accomplishments appeared to be the result of Confucius, patience, and supernatural strength." See Sylvia Sun Minnick, Sam-fow: The San Joaquin Chinese Legacy (Fresno: Panorama West Publishing, 1988), pp. xvi-xvii.

35. Rudolph M. Lapp, Afro-Americans in California (San Francisco: Boyd and Fraser, 1987), p. 112.

36. Books by Charles Wollenberg include All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Golden Gate Metropolis: Perspectives on Bay Area History (Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies, 1985); and Marinship at War: Shipbuilding and Social Change in Wartime Sausalito (Berkeley: Western Heritage Press, 1990).

37. Gloria Ricci Lothrop, "California Women," in Nunis and Lothrop, A Guide to the History of California , pp. 111-128.

38. McWilliams, California: The Great Exception .

39. Ibid., p. 140.

40. Ibid., p. 128.

41. Ibid.

42. See, for example, Neil Larry Shumsky, The Evolution of Political Protest and the Workingmen's Party of California (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991); Ralph Mann, After the Gold Rush: Society in Grass Valley and Nevada City, California, 1849-1870 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982); Robert A. Burchell, "Opportunity and the Frontier: Wealth Holding in Twenty-Six Northern California Counties, 1848-1880," Western Historical Quarterly 18 (April 1987): 177-196; and Robert A. Burchell, "The Faded Dream: Inequality in Northern California in the 1860s and 1870s," Journal of American Studies 23 (August 1989): 215-234.

43. The influence of the International Workingmen's Association was short-lived, lasting only for the first half of the 1880s. Despite dramatic free speech fights in Fresno and San Diego and brief efforts to organize agricultural workers, the IWW (the Wobblies) never made much of an impact on California. As Kazin notes, the Wobblies in California had forty locals and five thousand members at their peak in 1914. He argues that, to a significant extent, the AFL "stole the syndicalists' thunder"; see Kazin, "Great Exception Revisited," pp. 390-391. This conclusion is congruent with my findings on lumber workers in the redwood region of California; see Cornford, Workers and Dissent , pp. 151-174. See also Cletus E. Daniel, "In Defense of the Wheatland Wobblies: A Critical Analysis of the IWW in California,'' Labor History 19 (Fall 1978): 485-509.

44. Kazin notes that before World War I the Los Angeles Central Labor Council and the Building Trades Council combined never amounted to more than six thousand members. This number represents only one-tenth of the membership of the San Francisco Labor Council and the Building Trades Council at their peak. During the 1940s and 1950s, the labor movement in southern California grew at a faster rate than in northern California; by 1957, Los Angeles had 204,000 more union members than San Francisco. At this time, however, 50 percent of the workers in San Francisco—Oakland were organized, whereas only 35 percent were organized in Los Angeles, and 37 percent in San Diego. See Kazin, "Great Exception Revisited," p. 389; and Irving Bernstein, "Trade Union Characteristics, Membership, and Influence," Monthly Labor Review 82 (May 1959): 533.

45. Leon Fink, Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor in American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 26. David Montgomery also stresses the importance of independent working-class political action in the Gilded Age; see Montgomery, "To Study the People: The American Working Class," Labor History 21 (Fall 1980): 485-512.

46. Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert (New York: Viking, 1986); Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire (New York: Pantheon, 1985); and Donald J. Pisani, From Family Farm to Agribusiness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

47. California Blue Book, 1950 (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1950), p. 783.

48. California Blue Book, 1954 (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1954), p. 598.

49. Maurice I. Gershenson, "Shifts in California's Industrial and Employment Composition," Monthly Labor Review 82 (May 1959): 509.

50. Bernstein, "Trade Union Characteristics," p. 534.

51. Taft, Labor Politics American Style , alludes to this interference and to the presence of AFL dissidents. More revealing is Jim Rose, "Collaboration with a Dual Union: Oakland AFL Political Practice, 1943-1947" (1990; unpublished paper in possession of the editor).

52. A good economic history of California has not been written, but the following are valuable works on the California economy during and after World War II: Gerald D. Nash, "Stages of California's Economic Growth, 1870-1970: An Interpretation," California Historical Quarterly 51 (Winter 1972): 315-330; Gerald D. Nash, The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Gerald D. Nash, World War II and the West: Reshaping the Economy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990); and Joel Kotkin and Paul Grabowicz, California Inc . (New York: Rawson, Wade, 1982). On the importance of defense spending and the military-industrial complex to California, see Roger W. Lotchin, Fortress California, 1910-1961: From Warfare to Welfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

53. San Francisco Chronicle , October 7, 1992, and August 7, 1993; San lose Mercury News , October 7, 1992.

54. San Francisco Chronicle , September 18, 1993.

55. Cited in Mike Davis, "Who Killed Los Angeles? Part Two: The Verdict Is Given," New Left Review 199 (May-June 1993): 29-54.

56. Ibid.

57. Useful recent newspaper accounts of working conditions in Silicon Valley include "Laboring in the Silicon Jungle," San Francisco Examiner , April 25, 1993; and "Heavy Load for Silicon Valley Workers," San Francisco Examiner , May 23, 1993. On recent efforts to organize workers in Silicon Valley, see "The Underside of High-Tech: Silicon Valley Immigrant Workers Fight Sweatshop Conditions," The Bay Guardian , January 27, 1993. On the decline of high-tech jobs in Silicon Valley, see San Francisco Chronicle , July 7, 1993, and July 29, 1993.

58. The November 28, 1991, issue of Time magazine was a special issue devoted to "California: The Endangered Dream." The situation has worsened since the publication of this issue. Statistics compiled by the U.S. Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis revealed that California ranked 47th in the growth of personal income between March 1991 and March 1993 ( San Francisco Chronicle , July 23, 1993).

VICKI RUIZ is professor of history at the Claremont Graduate School. She is the author of Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950 (1987). She is co-editor of Women on the U.S.-Mexican Border: Responses to Change (1987), Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives (1988), and Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History (1990).