Monthly Highlights – January 2022

Our theme for this month is California History. We chose resources that will increase student engagement with history-social science curriculum and help them see how they fit into the state's history. 

Featured Teaching Resources

• Teaching California 
  • The California Historical Society has 30 source sets available on their Teaching California beta site, which offers educators the ability to download high-resolution versions of individual primary sources
• Lost LA Curriculum Project
  • This project uses Lost LA episodes to present culturally relevant teaching materials centered on local history. Navigate lessons by topic, watch the documentaries, download the PDFs of lessons and classroom activities and find related articles. The Lost LA Curriculum Project works with California's history-social science instructional framework and aligns local stories and materials with state educational standards.
  • The Lost LA Curriculum project is a collaboration among KCET (Public Media Group of Southern California), USC Libraries, the UCLA History-Geography Project and the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.

Current Events

• Electronics, Fashion, and a Circular Economy
  • Having just returned from winter break, and the shopping and gifting that often goes with it, students can explore the environmental impact of our consumer economy in the new issue of Current Context. A short reading and classroom activities with maps, data, and interactive media provide students with an overview of a global issue and its potential solutions.
• Eastside Stories: The Inland Empire & US History
  • The Riverside County Office of Education and the UCLA History-Geography Project are proud to announce a new Teaching with Primary Sources workshop, Eastside Stories: The Inland Empire & US History. Each session will feature a talk from a historian which will be supplemented by a model lesson by our teacher leaders. Eastside Stories is free and open to all interested K-12 and Ethnic Studies teachers who emphasize local and U.S. history in their classrooms. All participants will receive stipends for creating lessons and books on some of the topics we explore.

Educator Spotlight

Dr. Michelle Lorimer is a faculty member at California State University, San Bernardino. Her most recent book, Resurrecting the Past: The California Mission Myth, critiques the romanticized narrative presented at mission sites and centers Native peoples’ contributions to California history. In addition to her scholarly research, Dr. Lorimer actively engages in public history, seeking to put her scholarship into practice. For instance, she has worked with the California History-Social Science Project to support the implementation of teacher instruction guidelines from the California History-Social Science Framework and develop content for Teaching California. Her commitment to making history accessible and culturally responsive serve as a model for other educators.

We asked Dr. Lorimer, "Why is it important for university faculty and K-12 educators to collaborate?" and she shared this with us:

We have many shared goals related to both content and student development. While we interact with students at different points in their lives, our collaboration provides us with a lot of room to share and grow as educators. The student-centered approaches, innovative teaching strategies, and ability to use technology in different ways that I've seen from many k-12 teachers has influenced the way that I teach at the university level. I've built better relationships with my students since adopting several of these strategies.  At the same time, I really enjoy seeing the tangible and direct application of my research with primary and secondary teachers and students. Their input and feedback has enriched my work.

Picture Books 

• Jada's Dance for Chicano Park - Vera Sanchez, illustrated by Beto Soto
  • On Chicano Park Day, Jada is excited for her debut performance. But today, it's her mommy who opens Jada's eyes about the history of the park as Jada images herself helping the people in the neighborhood- from the painting of the rainbow to the seeds planted in the dirt. But who waits for Jada at the end of her journey is someone she least expects and who promises to be there for Jada's debut performance.
• Last Stop on Market Street - Matt de la Pena, illustrated by Christian Robinson*
  • A young boy rides the bus across San Francisco with his grandmother and learns to appreciate the beauty in everyday things. 
• Our California - Pam Munoz Ryan, illustrated by Rafael Lopez
  • The art in this book is colorful, evocative, and just plain stunning. The text is brief, four-line verses that highlight some interesting features in the 14 California locations, or give reasons for their historical or current importance. Some of the places are well known (such as San Francisco and Los Angeles) and some will be less familiar to children.  Includes an illustrated spread featuring the state symbols.
• Pop's Bridge - Eve Bunting, illustrated by C.F Payne*
  • When it was completed in 1937, San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge was hailed as an international marvel. This riveting story salutes the ingenuity and courage of every person who helped raise this majestic American icon.
• Voices of the Dust Bowl - Sherry Garland, illustrated by Judy Hierstein*
  • From the Voices of History series, the author describes her view of the largest environmental catastrophe in American history. Each double-page spread pairs a profile that dramatizes how the disaster affected daily lives, with a large, unframed illustration that shows individuals close up against the background of the devastated land. A good title for pairing with the curriculum, this includes a bibliography, and a long historical note adds an overview about the dust bowl’s social history, geology, conservation, and more.

*Annotations adapted from Titlewave

Recent Scholarship

• The Other California: Land, Identity, and Politics on the Mexican Borderlands - Verónica Castillo-Muñoz (2016)
  • The Other California is the story of working-class communities and how they constituted the racially and ethnically diverse landscape of Baja California. Packed with new and transformative stories, the book examines the interplay of land reform and migratory labor on the peninsula from 1850 to 1954, as governments, foreign investors, and local communities shaped a vibrant and dynamic borderland alongside the booming cities of Tijuana, Mexicali, and Santa Rosalia. Migration and intermarriage between Mexican women and men from Asia, Europe, and the United States transformed Baja California into a multicultural society
• Big Sur: The Making of a Prized California Landscape - Shelley Alden Brooks (2017) 
  • A remote, inaccessible, and undeveloped pastoral landscape until 1937, Big Sur quickly became a cultural symbol of California and the West, as well as a home to the ultrawealthy. This transformation was due in part to writers and artists such as Robinson Jeffers and Ansel Adams, who created an enduring mystique for this coastline. But Big Sur’s prized coastline is also the product of the pioneering efforts of residents and Monterey County officials who forged a collaborative public/private preservation model for Big Sur that foreshadowed the shape of California coastal preservation in the twenty-first century…This book highlights today’s intricate and ambiguous intersections of class, the environment, and economic development through the lens of an iconic California landscape.
• Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865–1941 - Jessica Kim (2019)
  • Jessica M. Kim reexamines the rise of Los Angeles from a small town to a global city against the backdrop of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Gilded Age economics, and American empire. It is a far-reaching transnational history, chronicling how Los Angeles boosters transformed the borderlands through urban and imperial capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century and how the Mexican Revolution redefined those same capitalist networks into the twentieth.
• After the Grizzly: Endangered Species and the Politics of Place in California - Peter S. Alagona (2020) 
  • After the Grizzly traces the history of endangered species and habitat in California, from the time of the Gold Rush to the present. Peter S. Alagona shows how scientists and conservationists came to view the fates of endangered species as inextricable from ecological conditions and human activities in the places where those species lived.
• Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy - George J. Sánchez (2021)
  • Boyle Heights is an in-depth history of the Los Angeles neighborhood, showcasing the potent experiences of its residents, from early contact between Spanish colonizers and native Californians to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the hunt for hidden Communists among the Jewish population, negotiating citizenship and belonging among Latino migrants and Mexican American residents, and beyond…Boyle Heights is immigrant America embodied, and it can serve as the true beacon on a hill toward which the country can strive in a time when racial solidarity and civic resistance have never been in greater need.
• We Are the Land: A History of Native California - Damon B. Akins & William J. Bauer, Jr. (2021) 
  • We Are the Land is the first and most comprehensive text of its kind, centering the long history of California around the lives and legacies of the Indigenous people who shaped it…A text designed to fill the glaring need for an accessible overview of California Indian history, We Are the Land will be a core resource in a variety of classroom settings, as well as for casual readers and policymakers interested in a history that centers the native experience.