There has long been a large, Salinas-sized hole in the history of academic studies of Monterey County. Although Susan Shillinglaw and others have produced useful guidebooks to Steinbeck Country, those have been aimed primarily at literary tourists rather than scholars. Similarly, although local historians have produced a number of histories of Salinas over the years, those volumes—with one wonderful, hydrologically focused exception—have tended to be books supported by local organizations and/or intended for local readers, and those authors have generally given those readers a tale spiced with local color but otherwise fairly straight out of the Manifest Destiny school of American historiography—white men becoming whiter while overcoming non- or less-white men and other obstacles in their fore-ordained mission to conquer and settle the continent.
There has even been a wealth of valuable, highly researched volumes about Monterey County in the last few decades, but Salinas’s place in them has been...
