The 9 Best East Bay Yesterday Podcast Episodes
1) “Where are those ancestors now?”: How battles over sacred sites have revived Ohlone culture
Have you ever wondered what the East Bay was like before colonization? In this episode, Corrina Gould of Indian People Organizing for Change shares knowledge of how her ancestors, the Ohlone people, m...Show More
2) The missing chapter: Filling in the blanks of the Bay Area’s Native American history
“Contrary to popular belief, most Native American people in the United States live in urban areas and not reservations.” Those words are from “Refusing Settler Domesticity: Native Women’s Labor and Re...Show More
3) “Those wonderful smells”: A Bay Area coffee history crash course
Before the 1960s, coffee was a faceless commodity: hot brown beanwater with caffeine. Alfred Peet began a revolution in America’s coffee culture when he opened his first shop in Berkeley in 1966. Peet...Show More
4) “The neighborhood time forgot”: A strange sliver of waterfront
There’s a small stretch of Oakland’s shoreline unlike any place else. Nestled between the restaurants of Jack London Square and the modern apartment blocks of Brooklyn Basin sits 5th Avenue Marina. Th...Show More
5) “The ballroom communist”: How a radical aristocrat changed Oakland
How did Jessica Mitford go from being an elite British debutante to fighting on the front lines of America’s early civil rights struggles? While two of her older sisters befriended Adolph Hitler, Jess...Show More
6) “Not on the wealth corridor”: Why older neighborhoods get left behind
There’s an area southeast of Lake Merritt that’s lined with abandoned buildings, boarded up storefronts, vacant lots, and decrepit warehouses. The neighborhoods here, Clinton and San Antonio, are some...Show More
7) "We were being erased": The woman who saved California’s Black history
Delilah Beasley didn’t have much education or money, but when she saw that African Americans were being ignored by history books, she knew she had to do something. Beasley ended up spending nearly a d...Show More
8) Long Lost Oakland, chapter 5: Overcoming racism, Lew Hing became king of Oakland’s canning industry
Following the 1906 earthquake, Oakland’s Lew Hing supported thousands of victims from San Francisco’s Chinatown who were turned away from official relief camps due to rampant discrimination. On the gr...Show More
9) Long Lost Oakland, chapter 3: How battles over sacred sites have revived Ohlone culture
Out of all the features on the Long Lost Oakland map, the Ohlone shellmounds have drawn the most questions. Many of those questions were addressed in an earlier episode, so I’m sharing it again. Here’...Show More
10) “We let everybody throw it away”: How garbage worked before corporations took over
In recent years, volunteer-led groups like Urban Compassion Project have struggled to deal with illegal dumping in Oakland. Despite removing more than half a million pounds of trash this year, piles o...Show More