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Best known for its movie industry, surfing, and amusement parks, Southern California boasts an environment of glamour, both natural and manmade. It Happened in Southern California tells the stories of intriguing people and events from the history of this region-from the first ships to arrive in San Diego in 1769 to the Watts Riots of 1965.
Follow a brave little band of multiracial settlers in 1781 up the California coast to a new frontier town today known as Los Angeles. Go back to the Chinatown war of 1871, which some say was sparked by love, but others knew for what it was: a battle over race and money. Learn about the "puppet show" in 1988, performed not for kindergartners but for a baby condor destined to fly wild and free over Southern California's skies. It Happened in Southern California describes everything from the efforts of the first Spanish colonialists to the reintroduction of endangered condor.
About the author
Noelle Sullivan is a historian and storyteller who lives in West Yellowstone, Montana. She has published two small books of history, It Happened in Southern California (Falcon/Globe Pequot, 1996) and M-e Ecci Aashi Awadi: The Knife River Indian Villages (Theodore Roosevelt Nature & History Association, 1996). Her essays and stories have been featured in The New Montana Story and Writing Montana: Literature Under the Big Sky, among other places. She writes for the blog Montana Gael, www.MontanaGael.blogspot.com, and is at work on a biography of an early Irish visitor to Yellowstone Park, the Earl of Dunraven. She has a master's degree in the history of the American West from the University of New Mexico, and specializes in Irish-American studies. She is mother to three lovely Irish dancers.
