Join the Endless Summer Seminar for a discussion of Elsa Devienne's book Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles shoreline is one of the most iconic natural landscapes in the United States, if not the world. Yet, in the early twentieth century Angelenos routinely lamented the city’s crowded, polluted, and eroded sands, many of which were private and thus inaccessible to the public. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, LA’s engineers, city officials, urban planners, and business elite worked together to transform the relatively untouched beaches into modern playgrounds for the white middle class. The members of this powerful “beach lobby” reinvented the beach experience for the suburban age, effectively preventing a much-feared “white flight” from the coast. But as they opened up vast public spaces for many Angelenos to express themselves, show off their bodies, and forge alternative communities, they made clear that certain groups of beachgoers, including African Americans, gay men and women, and bodybuilders, were no longer welcome. Sand Rush not only uncovers how the Los Angeles coastline was literally constructed but also how this major planning and engineering project affected the lives of ordinary city-dwellers and transformed global expectations of what a beach should look and feel like. As the ongoing climate crisis threatens coastal communities around the world, the story of LA’s beaches bring to the fore how much we have transformed our environments and what we stand to lose if we do not put an end to our fossil fuel addiction. 

Elsa Devienne is Assistant Professor of History at Northumbria University in the UK. She is a specialist of the twentieth-century United States with expertise in environmental history, urban history, the history of the body and, more recently, the history of waste. Her first book, Sand Rush, was initially published in French (Sorbonne Editions, 2020) before coming out in English in an augmented version with a new epilogue (Oxford University Press, 2024). The book won the 2021 Willi Paul Adams Award awarded by the Organization of American Historians, the 2025 Arthur Miller First Book Prize, and the 2025 W. Turrentine Jackson Award.

Co-sponsored by the Visual Studies Research Institute and the Caltech Program in Visual Culture.

RSVP to [email protected].