Sponsored by the Book Club of California. How do we uncover the arc of a social movement through its broadsides, street sheets, mimeographed leaflets, and print ephemera? In this illustrated talk, Eric Noble will explore the Digger movement of 1960s San Francisco — a radical network of free stores, free food, and free theater — […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California. In 1870 at age 33, Sara Plummer Lemmon left the East Coast and moved west to Santa Barbara, where she taught herself botany and established the town’s first library. Ten years later she married botanist John Gill Lemmon, and together the two discovered hundreds of new plant species, […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California. “Presenting Jane” honors the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth through an exploration of the challenges, discoveries, and new ways a 21st-century audience has encountered the woman and her work. In this ATBL-Book Club of California event, collector and curator Mary Crawford alongside Professor and Library Director Kirsten […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California. In the Middle Ages, monsters were of great interest to artists, authors, and theologians. They appear in all visual media and all textual genres. They were, to their creators, both serious subjects of contemplation and fun entertainment. This talk will focus on a particular set of medieval monsters […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California. This talk is based on the book Koreatown, Los Angeles: Immigration, Race, and the “American Dream,” which delves into the social and cultural history of Korean Americans in Los Angeles, focusing on the period from the late 1960s to the early 2000s. The presentation will explore the argument that building […]
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 […]