Right Out of California: the 1930s and The Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism (New Press, 2017) by Kathryn S. Olmsted, professor and chair of the Department of History. Olmsted re-examines the labor disputes in Depression-era California that led California's businessmen and media to create a new style of politics with corporate funding, intelligence gathering, professional campaign consultants and alliances between religious and economic conservatives.

Kathryn Olmsted studies the cultural and political history of the United States since World War I. Her first book, Challenging the Secret Government, examined the congressional and journalistic investigations of the CIA and FBI after Watergate, while her second book, Red Spy Queen, analyzed the origins and significance of the spy scare of the 1940s. Her third book, Real Enemies, explored the dynamic relationship between real government conspiracies and anti-government conspiracy theories. Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism (The New Press, 2015), analyzed the conservative reaction to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Her most recent book, The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler, looks at the isolationist media in the US and the UK in the 1930s and 1940s. Professor Olmsted also co-edited a book on the history of the Central Intelligence Agency and has published journal articles and book chapters that highlight her overlapping areas of expertise: conspiracy theories, government secrecy, espionage, counterintelligence, and anticommunism.

View the book at the New Press