Sponsored by The Book Club of California. What does it mean to imagine the American West through Black experience? For too long, popular culture, from Hollywood Westerns to novels, music, and television, has erased or distorted Black presence in the West, leaving us with an incomplete story of American identity. Black Wests: Reshaping Race and Place […]
Sponsored by the Book Club of California. With some 400 members, the San Francisco-based California Camera Club was the largest photography network in the United States in the early twentieth century. In her book The California Camera Club, Carolin Görgen recaptures the lost history of this community—both women and men—and their crucial contribution to shaping the […]
Sponsored by the Book Club of California. Though canon concerns seem to be a relic of 1990s academia, we are, once again, at a historical moment when there is resistance to teaching texts by writers of color and texts that deal with race, ethnicity and gender. At the same time, algorithmic bias scholars are locating […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California The American Sunday paper of the 1890s transformed the daily edition with inserts and supplements of all shapes and sizes. Each asked readers to do more than read, but to interact with the materiality of the paper as a form of leisure. The Sunday paper became so large […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California In 1960 the aspiring Texas writer Larry McMurtry enrolled in Stanford University with a fellowship in the Stegner creative writing program. Along with his studies, McMurtry became immersed in the world of antiquarian and used bookshops that flourished during that time in the San Francisco Bay Area, and […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California In 1938, China City opened near downtown Los Angeles. Featuring a recreation of the House of Wang set from MGM’s The Good Earth, this new Chinatown employed many of the same Chinese Americans who performed as background extras in the 1937 film. Chinatown and Hollywood represented the two […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California As a counterpart to research on the 1930s that has focused on liberal and radical writers calling for social revolution, David Welky offers this eloquent study of how mainstream print culture shaped and disseminated a message affirming conservative middle-class values and assuring its readers that holding to these […]
The Celebrate People’s History poster series has organized and curated by Josh MacPhee since 1998. The over 200 posters in the ongoing series are rooted in the do-it-yourself tradition of mass-produced and distributed political propaganda, but detourned to embody principles of democracy, inclusion, and group participation in the writing and interpretation of history. Over more […]
Troublemaker tells the wild and unlikely story of Jessica Mitford, fifth of the six famous Mitford Girls, a British aristocrat-turned-American Communist, famous for exposés like The American Way of Death; this biography brings her astonishing self-transformation to life with a riveting, often hilarious account of trading wealth and status for a life of radical activism. Who […]
Few people realize that Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize, was written in California in 1939-41. After winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936, O’Neill and his third wife, the actress Carlotta Monterey, built Tao House just outside Danville, California. Realizing that his writing career was coming to an […]
For many people, the concept of landscape is associated with gardens, especially estate gardens. California Eden reaches far beyond the elite circle of private estates; this book highlights a wide range of landscapes from the professional to the vernacular and delves deep into the cultural and historical significance of these landscapes, revealing the untold stories of the […]
Out of the Gutters: Obscenity, Censorship, and Transgression, edited by Jorge J. Santos and Patrick S. Lawrence, explores US comics that have been challenged for their boundary-breaking content. Covering well-known underground figures like R. Crumb and Charles Burns, newcomers such as C. Spike Trotman and Emil Ferris, and mainstream creators including Chris Claremont and Archie […]