Podcast

The West on Fire, explores the West’s relationship with fire, and how it has shaped both our past and present. Topics include fire practices in Indigenous communities, the history of Black firefighters in Los Angeles, smoke and urban air quality, farmworker community health during wildfires, post-wildfire debris flow, the origins and endurance of Smokey Bear, incarcerated firefighters, and more.

L.A.’s Chinatown is a bustling cultural and business hub, legendary in cinematic history and popular with tourists and locals alike. Yet below its surface lies a challenging history – of racial discrimination as well as community resilience – going back more than a century and a half. This season explores the past, present, and future of one of L.A.’s oldest neighborhoods and one of the first Chinese American cultural centers in the U.S. Expanding on ICW’s multi-year Chinatown History Project. Episodes focus on the many ways we view Chinatown, both in L.A. and nationally; the Los Angeles Anti-Chinese Massacre of 1871; exclusion and inclusion of the Chinese American community; the erasure of old Chinatown and the emergence of new Chinatown; the long L.A. history of the See family; and the future of Chinatown in the era of COVID, the Stop Asian Hate movement, gentrification, and more. Season 2 of Western Edition is produced by Avishay Artsy, Katie Dunham, Greg Hise, Jessica Kim, Elizabeth Logan, Olivia Ramirez, Li Wei Yang, and Stephanie Yi.

Given the nation’s widespread and often heated reckoning with sites of memorialization and commemoration in recent years, the new season of Western Edition questions six such sites across the American West from Catalina Island to Daly City, California; Jackson, Wyoming to Los Angeles; Denver to San Antonio.

Who put that plaque there? Who decided that a statue needed to be fixed on a plinth in that space or on that street corner? And when? Why was it worth marking or remembering? Is it still important or significant, perhaps now maybe for different reasons? Do community members, people who walk by, or those who make an effort to visit, find these places and the words written about them meaningful?

More than 50 million viewers begin each new year looking to Pasadena, tuning into the Rose Parade to see flower and seed-coated floats cruise slowly down Colorado Boulevard. But to nearly 1450,000 of those viewers, the “City of Roses” is home, a complex suburb of downtown Los Angeles with a deep history. Pasadena has played a greater role in American and Pacific histories than most of its residents even know.

This season digs deep into the “Crown City” of the San Gabriel Valley with  six little-known Pasadena stories, from Simons brickyard to Vroman’s bookstore, St. Barnabas church to the Shoya House at The Huntington. It also considers Pasadenans from the past, from John Brown’s children to John Birch’s followers.