• A Visual Journey: Sara Plummer Lemmon’s Life of Science and Art

    Book Club of California

    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, […]

  • Presenting Jane: Showing and Sharing Jane Austen in the 21st Century

    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 […]

  • Wonders of the East: Medieval Belief and Making Monsters in the Middle Ages

    Book Club of California

    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 […]

  • Koreatown Los Angeles: Immigration, Race, and the “American Dream”

    Book Club of California

    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 […]

  • Black Wests: Reshaping Race and Place in Popular Culture

    Book Club of California

    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 […]