History of California Podcast
Booking Overview
Metrics
Episodes: 190
Frequency: Weekly
Rating: 4.5/5.0
Estimated listeners: 1,000 - 10,000
Gender skew: Neutral
Listener location: USA
Contact Information
Publicly listed emails
jordanmattox@gmail.com
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Host
Jordan Mattox - Host of the History of California Podcast, exploring the state’s history through narrative histories and in-depth conversations with historians, scholars, authors, and other experts.
Booking Intelligence
Booking Requirements
Recent Guest Discussions
Joseph Ogilvy - California’s Fishing And Canning Industries, Nature Writing, Ecological Change, Extraction, Conservation, And The History Of Cannery Row.
Jon Dawson - John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, Depression-era Agricultural Labor, Fruit Strikes, Migrant Camps, Communism, Ideology, And Literary Naturalism.
John Langellier - The History Of San Francisco’s Presidio, Military And Public History, Museums, Indigenous History, Cold War Defenses, The Buffalo Soldiers, And Historical Representation In Film.
Daniel Lanza Rivers - California’s Environmental History, Settler Colonialism, Extraction, Central Valley Agriculture, Indigenous Land Return, Klamath River Dam Removals, And Ecological Justice.
Kevin Ferguson - The History Of California Wine, Prohibition, The Judgment Of Paris, The Boutique Winery Movement, Family Archives, And Immigrant Entrepreneurship.
Recent Topics
Episodes
185 - Podcast Updates and Dr. Iris Engstrand
September 28, 2026
Today I'm doing something a little different. I'm re-releasing a conversation I recorded back in 2021 with Dr. Iris Engstrand, one of the great historians of California, who passed away on September 12th at the age of 91. Iris was a native Californian, born in Los Angeles in 1935. She earned her bachelor's, master's, and doctorate in history at the University of Southern California, where she wrote her dissertation on the scientific side of Spanish exploration in New Spain in the late 1700s. ...
184 - Joseph Ogilvy, Tin Can Coast: A History of Industry, Greed, and Fishing in the Golden State
September 01, 2026
In this episode of the History of California Podcast, host Jordan Mattox sits down with writer and chef Joseph Ogilvy to discuss his first book, Tin Can Coast: A History of Industry, Greed, and Fishing in the Golden State. Trained at Oxford and seasoned in restaurant kitchens in London and Austin, Ogilvy came to this history the hard way — gutting sardines, mackerel, and John Dory by the half-ton until a visceral question took hold: if that's what half a ton of fish feels like, what does eigh...
183 - Dr. Jon Dawson, In Dubious Battle
August 21, 2026
John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle (1936) is the coldest and most clinical of his California labor novels — the story of a fruit strike that offers no easy heroes and no comfort, only a chain of cause and effect grinding toward violence. It's also the book that established Steinbeck as an authority on farm labor and pointed him toward The Grapes of Wrath. Host Jordan Mattox is joined by Steinbeck scholar Dr. Jon Dawson to unpack the novel and the history beneath it: the real strikes at Tagus ...
Publicly listed emails
jordanmattox@gmail.com
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