A Companion to American Agricultural History. Группа авторов

Vaught, Cultivating California (1999) and Street, “Marketing California Crops at the Turn of the Century” (1979). A number of doctoral dissertations on the cooperative efforts of growers of specific crops, most of them conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1920s, are cited in these works.

      Though most analyses of the specialty-crop era contain elements of environmental history, several scholars have placed nature and ecology at the forefront of their studies, most notably Benny J. Andrés, Power and Control of the Imperial Valley (2014), Christopher J. Castaneda and Lee M. A. Simpson, River City and Valley Life (2013), Igler, Industrial Cowboys (2001), Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies (2007), Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert (1986), Sackman, Orange Empire (2009), Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage (1998), Ian Tyrell, True Gardens of the Gods (1999), and Sarah D. Wald, The Nature of California (2016).

      With regard to cotton production in California, the two best overviews are John H. Turner, White Gold Comes to California (1981) and Moses S. Musoke and Alan L. Olmstead, “The Rise of the Cotton Industry in California” (1982). In Creating Abundance (2008), Olmstead and Rhode continue their analyses on biological innovation with an emphasis on the San Joaquin Valley’s extraordinary one-variety community movement over a 40-year period in the first half of the twentieth century to its subsequent demise in the late 1950s and 1960s. On the Imperial Valley, the essential work is Andrés, Power and Control of the Imperial Valley (2014). Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost (1987), offers a comparative perspective with the American South. Prior to mechanization, the focus necessarily turned to labor; see especially Daniel, Bitter Harvest (1982) and Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold (1994). Despite its flaws, Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman, The King of California (2003) is a must-read.

      Finally, there are a number of useful broad, general works on California agriculture available, including Walter Ebling, The Fruited Plain (1980), Lawrence J. Jelinek, Harvest Empire (1982), Joseph A. McGowan, History of the Sacramento Valley (1961), Scheuring, A Guidebook to California Agriculture (1983), and Richard A. Walker, The Conquest of Bread (2004). The best textbook on California history—and the one that offers the most and best insights on agriculture and related topics—is Richard B. Rice, William A. Bullough, Richard J. Orsi, Mary Ann Irwin, Michael F. Magliari, and Cecilia M. Tsu, The Elusive Eden (5th ed. 2020).