Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities Journal

This article recenters Napa Valley's rise by challenging the dominant narrative that defines its history through luxury, refinement, and economic success. Instead, I argue that Napa's transformation in the late nineteenth century can only be understood through an analytic framework that links three histories often examined separately: ecological change, working-class experience, and capitalist consolidation. Using the period between 1880 and 1905 as a critical window, the paper adopts a multispecies, history-from-below approach to show how phylloxera's disruption of grapevines, the social effects of widespread brandy consumption among immigrant laborers, and the creation of exclusive wine cooperatives formed the foundations of Napa's modern identity.Rather than treating environmental issues, public disorder, and business organization as separate developments, this article demonstrates that they worked together as interdependent forces that shaped the region's image, economy, and social order. By examining how wine industry leaders minimized the pest's impact, criminalized working-class instability, and strategically curated a polished image of Napa, the paper reveals that the success story typically told relies on both structural erasure and selective memory. Reconnecting fragmented strands of scholarship and overlooked archival evidence exposes a far more textured history-one defined as much by instability, exclusion, and adaptation as by prosperity and prestige. Ultimately, this argument recasts Napa's ascent not as a seamless path toward world-class recognition, but as a contingent process driven by the very actors and ecological relations that its celebrated identity has long concealed.