Sponsored by The Book Club of California. California’s 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the “instant city” of San Francisco as a base to exploit the rich natural resources of the American West. City of Wood examines how capitalists and workers logged the state’s vast redwood forests to create the financial capital and construction materials needed to […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California. In 1891 while still teens in Portland, Oregon, Maurice and Peter Binford started an influential career as publishers. They went on to found the Binfords & Mort publishing company focused on Pacific Northwest literature. This talk will explore how this mostly forgotten company, once the largest publisher west […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California Professor Emerita Dee E. Andrews and Assistant Professor Christopher S. Parmenter will discuss two elements of their new book manuscript, Thomas Clarkson’s Latin Essay: The Making of an Abolitionist Author in the Age of Revolution. Based on the first translation of Clarkson’s “An Liceat Invitos in Servitutem Dare” […]
The damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park is widely seen as a watershed event in American environmental history. Passionately opposed by naturalist John Muir and his ardent supporters, the massive undertaking succeeded largely through the efforts of John R. Freeman, one of the most important, influential, and politically adroit engineers of the […]
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 […]