Orange County is one of the best-known, yet least understood, counties in California. The popular image of beautiful people in beach cities is certainly accurate. But the Orange County that is often overlooked includes workaday lives in Anaheim, the barrios of Santa Ana, townhouse living in Brea and the diverse communities of Little Saigon, Little Texas, Los Rios, La Habra and Silverado Canyon. Modern Orange County offers very little sense of history, and it sometimes seems as if the urbanization of the 1960s is all that defines the place. Orange County historian Phil Brigandi fills in the gaps with this collection of essays that explores the very creation of the county, as well as pressing issues of race, citrus, attractions and annexation.

Journalist, novelist, and scholar Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-85) remains one of the most influential and popular writers on the struggles of American Indians. This volume collects for the first time seven of her most important articles, annotated and introduced by Jackson scholars Valerie Sherer Mathes and Phil Brigandi. Valuable as eyewitness accounts of Mission Indian life in Southern California in the 1880s, the articles also offer insight into Jackson's career. The articles served as the basis for Jackson's 1884 romantic novel, Ramona, still popular among Americans today. Jackson journeyed to Southern California in the 1880s to learn firsthand how Indians there lived. She found them in a demoralized state, beset by failed government policies and constantly threatened with losing their lands. The numerous articles and editorial responses she penned made her a leading voice in the fight for American Indian rights, a role she embraced wholeheartedly. As this collection also shows, Jackson's fondness for Old California helped shape the region's mythology and tourist culture. But her most important work was her influence in getting reservations set aside for the beleaguered Southern California tribes. Although her recommendations were not implemented until after her death, Helen Hunt Jackson's stark and revealing portrait drew national attention to the effects of white encroachment on Indian lands and cultures in California and inspired generations of reformers who continued her legacy. This unprecedented collection offers fresh insight into the life and work of a well-known and influential writer and reformer.

Inseparable from the history of the Indians of Southern California is the role of the Indian agent - a government functionary whose chief duty was, according to the Office of Indian Affairs, to ""induce his Indian to labor in civilized pursuits."" Offering a portrait of the Mission Indian agents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Reservations, Removal, and Reform reveals how individual agents interpreted this charge, and how their actions and attitudes affected the lives of the Mission Indians of Southern California. This book tells the story of the government agents, both special and regular, who served the Mission Indians from 1850 to 1903, with an emphasis on seven regular agents who served from 1878 to 1903. Relying on the agents' reports and correspondence as well as newspaper articles and court records, authors Valerie Sherer Mathes and Phil Brigandi create a vivid picture of how each man - each a political appointee tasked with implementing ever-changing policies crafted in far-off Washington, D.C. - engaged with the issues and events confronting the Mission Indians, from land tenure and water rights to education, law enforcement, and health care. Providing a balanced, comprehensive view of the world these agents temporarily inhabited and the people they were called to serve, Reservations, Removal, and Reform deepens and broadens our understanding of the lives and history of the Indians of Southern California.