For more than twenty years, the Los Angeles Times columnist Al Martinez (1929-2015) delighted, and enriched the lives of, thousands of readers across southern California. An Oakland native, he attended San Francisco State College. Later, he was a reporter for the Richmond Independent and the Oakland Tribune before being lured to Los Angeles to write […]
Five generations of Judsons have worked with artists, architects, and designers to create Old World-style stained glass whose quality and craftsmanship has often been compared to the work of Louis Tiffany. Famed for its Craftsman glass, Judson arts-and-crafts era windows have been celebrated by experts in the field for decades. Judson’s work with Frank Lloyd […]
California owes its origins and sunny prosperity to slavery. Spanish invaders captured Indigenous people to build the chain of Catholic missions. Russian otter hunters shipped Alaska Natives—the first slaves transported into California—and launched a Pacific slave triangle to China. Plantation slaves were marched across the plains for the Gold Rush. San Quentin Prison incubated California’s […]
Before Amazon, before big box stores, and even before mailboxes sagged under the weight of catalogs in the mid-20th century, customers and shop-owners alike turned to a wide variety of media to select their purchases, and to aspire to grander lifestyles. Trade cards, trade catalogs, advertising ephemera, and sales samples illuminate the art of buying, […]
Author Donna J. Nicol tells the extraordinary story of Dr. Claudia H. Hampton, the California State University (CSU) system’s first Black woman trustee, who later became the board’s first woman chair, and her twenty-year fight (1974–94) to increase access within the CSU for historically marginalized and underrepresented groups. Amid a growing white backlash against changes […]
Set against the glittering backdrop of Los Angeles during the gin-soaked Jazz Age and the rise of Hollywood, this debut book celebrates Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie star, to bring an unsung heroine to light and reclaim her place in cinema history. Before Constance Wu, Sandra Oh, Awkwafina, or Lucy Liu, there […]
Progressive school founder, collector and bibliophile Kent Bicknell will present on his Alcott Family Collection, winner of a recent prize from the New England-based Ticknor Society. Built around the lives and work of Louisa May Alcott (Little Women), her talented sister, the artist May Alcott Nieriker, and her parents, social worker, Abigail Alcott and progressive […]
In popular mythology, the Overland Trail is typically a triumphant tale, with plucky easterners crossing the Plains in caravans of covered wagons. But not everyone reached Oregon and California. Some 6,600 migrants perished along the way and were buried where they fell, often on Indigenous land. As historian Sarah Keyes illuminates, their graves ultimately became […]
An essential piece in California Studies, Redemptive Dreams: Engaging Kevin Starr’s California offers the first critical engagement with the vision of California’s most ambitious interpreter. While Starr’s multifaceted and polymathic vision of California offered a unique gaze—synthesizing central features, big themes, and incredible problems with the propitious golden dream—his eight-volume California Dream series, along with several other books and […]
Deep Oakland: How Geology Shaped a City, presents a seldom-attempted blend of human and geologic history, explaining the stories told by the physical landscape and detailing how the city has interacted with it. Wealth generated in the region from its geological resources―water, stone, soil and minerals―has influenced societies from the pre-contact Ohlones to the Americans […]
The fields of book history and bibliography are having a cultural reckoning. The Women in Book History Bibliography (womensbookhistory.org) has acted as an impetus for championing the “lost” histories of women in the book trades and as a tool for arguing for further recovery work. Still in progress, the bibliography currently consists of over 2000 […]
At the time of Herman Melville’s death, in 1891, his novels had fallen into obscurity. Moby-Dick, his masterwork published in 1851, was out of print and unread. But in the 1920s, critical reassessments led to a “Melville revival.” This lecture surveys some of the famous and less well-known illustrated editions, artists’ books, and other visual interpretations, […]