Join the California History Section for a live webinar on Mythmaking, Myth Breaking: California at 175 on Thursday, September 18, at 4PM! 

See how myths have shaped our ideas about California and its communities at our special event! Our panelists explore the impact of stories that have left indelible marks on California’s cultural landscape: the Queen Calafia myth, dime novels, and the bestselling 19th-century novel, Ramona.

Panelist Topics & Bios:

“On the right hand of the Indies”: California—A Medieval Paradise and Its Black Warrior Queen 

Today, it’s all too easy to think of California as a forward-looking and progressive home for innovation. In short, as the future. But what if the way to the future is through the medieval past? California’s name comes from a late medieval/early modern romance concerned with Blackness, feminine power, race, and the Crusades. The romance’s writer and its readers, including the explorer Cortez, who gave the state its name, were looking for “Terrestrial Paradise,” heaven on earth, and in California they believed they had found it. This talk asks: What does it mean that Paradise was “on the right hand of the Indies”? How did medieval romance inform race and exploration? How has its medieval legacy made modern California?

Dr. Cord J. Whitaker is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Wellesley, where he specializes in the literature of the Middle Ages and the histories of race and racism

Pulp Fiction and the Polyglot Frontier

This presentation explores how the generation and distribution of dime novels, the preeminent form of pulp fiction in the late-19^th-century United States, contributed to the mythologizing of California and the Western frontier among folks back East. Often at a loss to describe or convey the reality of California life, American purveyors of popular fiction fell back on well-worn tropes and stereotypes from American literature of the previous century. These supposed eye-witness accounts of life in the West were often at odds with the lived experience of their purported authors, some of whom had established their credibility through reports in news media before appearing as fictionalized versions of themselves in dime novels. Still, the stories of California and the West persisted until, as Ralph Waldo Emerson noted, “on this fiction a real prosperity [was] rooted and grown.”

Dr. Morgan Swan is Dartmouth’s Special Collections Librarian for Teaching & Scholarly Engagement. He holds both a PhD in English Literature from Yale University and a Master's in Library and Information Science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Ramona Memories: Fiction, Tourism, and Southern California’s Past

Using Helen Hunt Jackson's wildly popular 19th century southern California novel Ramona as a case study, this presentation shows how we understand the past through a combination of fact, fiction and fantasy. From the 1880s to the 1960s tourists enamored of the novel flocked to the places where the story appeared to be set, apprehending real places (Casa de Estudillo) for their portrayals in fiction (as Ramona’s Marriage Place) and interweaving their own experiences (a honeymoon) in the landscape of fact with the lives of the fictional characters. 

Dr. Dydia DeLyser is a cultural-historical geographer, writer and researcher based in Los Angeles California and a professor in the Department of Geography & the Environment at California State University, Fullerton.

Moderated by Julia Sizek, a cultural anthropologist and environmental historian of California who has written primarily about conflict over land and natural resources in the California desert.