The Book Club of California is offering in-person and online programs and activities. Hybrid events with in-person attendance and a streaming element are also held.
In-person programs without a virtual component may be recorded for online viewing on our YouTube Channel after the event.
Unless otherwise noted, all events are free and open to the public and take place at the Book Club of California located at 312 Sutter Street, Suite 500 in San Francisco.
Please refer to the description under each event.
Email programs@bccbooks.org for any questions, or call (415) 781-7532 ext. 2. Many of our staff will be working remotely so please contact them by email or phone. Staff contact information can be found on our website.
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5:00 PM Pacific – Reception
6:00 PM Pacific – Program
The Oscar Lewis Awards were established by the Book Club of California in 1994 in honor of Oscar Lewis (1893-1992), author, historian, and club secretary. This year Dr. Albert L. Hurtado will be recognized for his contributions to Western History and Lawrence G. Van Velzer and Peggy Gotthold will be recognized for their contributions to the Book Arts.
This is an in-person and virtual event.
Click here to REGISTER to attend in-person at The Book Club of California
5:30 PM Pacific – Reception
6:00 PM Pacific – Program
Pasadena Heritage | 160 N Oakland Avenue | Pasadena, California 91101
Terminal lsland: Lost Communities on America’s Edge tells a story of the birth, flourishing, and ultimate destruction of Terminal Island, a vibrant community in Los Angeles Harbor.
Few Los Angelenos have visited Terminal Island, a sheltered spot in the Pacific Ocean that once served as a resort for wealthy Southern California landowners and as a refuge for its artists and writers and scientists, all in need of a respite from the heat of the city. Not long after the rich and creative were driven away by a greedy throng of industrialists and railroad magnates and the politics they wrought, Terminal Island became home to another thriving world, this time a small community of Japanese families, people linked by their lineage and their amazing ability to capture the biggest fish the Pacific had to offer. They were the fishermen of Terminal Island. And their wives. And their children. These people were at the heart of one of Southern California’s most important businesses: the fisheries.
And then came a war. A world war that devastated the hopes, dreams, homes, and families of the Japanese who lived on Terminal Island. The Japanese and Japanese American residents of the island were forced from their homes and sent to internment camps around the country. The island became, in the truest, deepest sense, a ghost town.
An in-person presentation by Naomi Hirahara, writer, journalist, and author
Click here to REGISTER to attend in-person at Pasadena Heritage
5:00 PM Pacific – Program
The Los Angeles shoreline is one of the most iconic natural landscapes in the United States, if not the world. Yet, in the early twentieth century Angelenos routinely lamented the city’s crowded, polluted, and eroded sands, many of which were private and inaccessible to the public.
Between the 1920s and the 1960s, LA’s engineers, city officials, urban planners, and business elite worked together to transform the relatively untouched beaches into modern playgrounds for the white middle class.
As they opened up vast public spaces for many Angelenos to express themselves, show off their bodies, and forge alternative communities, they made clear that certain groups of beachgoers, including African Americans, gay men and women, and bodybuilders, were no longer welcome.
Sand Rush not only uncovers how the Los Angeles coastline was constructed but also how this major planning and engineering project affected the lives of ordinary city-dwellers and attracted many Americans to move to Southern California.
A virtual presentation by Elsa Devienne, author and assistant professor in US History, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, England
5:00 PM Pacific – Program
Molly McClain tells the remarkable story of Ellen Browning Scripps (1836–1932), an American newspaperwoman, feminist, suffragist, abolitionist, and social reformer. She used her fortune to support women’s education, the labor movement, and public access to science, the arts, and education.
Born in London, Scripps grew up in rural poverty on the Illinois prairie. She went from rags to riches, living out that cherished American story in which people pull themselves up by their bootstraps with audacity, hard work, and luck. She and her brother, E. W. Scripps, built America’s largest chain of newspapers, linking midwestern industrial cities with booming towns in the West. Less well known today than the papers started by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, Scripps newspapers transformed their owners into millionaires almost overnight.
By the 1920s Scripps was worth an estimated $30 million, most of which she gave away. She established the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and appeared on the cover of Time magazine after founding Scripps College in Claremont, California. She also provided major financial support to organizations worldwide that promised to advance democratic principles and public education.
In Ellen Browning Scripps, McClain brings to life an extraordinary woman who played a vital role in the history of women, California, and the American West.
A virtual presentation by Molly McClain, author and professor of History, University of San Diego
5:30 PM Pacific – Reception
6:00 PM Pacific – Program
Pasadena Heritage | 160 N Oakland Avenue | Pasadena, California 91101
In Santa Monica Pier: America’s Last Great Pleasure Pier! historian James Harris tells the dramatic story of survival for this Southern California icon—fighting Mother Nature, politics and changing times. This rich history makes Santa Monica Pier more than a landmark, more than a pleasure pier or a must see on the West Coast.
For a hundred years the Pier has represented the link between people and the Pacific, a connection to all that’s possible, probable and worthy of dreams.
Take a ride on the Carousel. Take a dip on the coaster. Or just take a stroll on the deck. There’s something for everyone on the Santa Monica Pier. A classic pleasure pier with a certain je ne sais quoi, it attracts crowds of visitors from all over the world.
Join us to share in the history of this Southern California gem—it’s the closest you can get to going to the pier without actually being there.
An in-person presentation by James Harris, author and historian
Click here to REGISTER to attend in-person at Pasadena Heritage
5:00 PM Pacific – Program
From a book’s “spine” to its “appendix,” bibliographers use a language of the body that reveals our intimate connection with books. Yet books do more than describe bodies—they embody a frontline of colonization in which Indigenous authors battle the public perception and reception of Indigenous peoples. Starting with John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854) as the first novel to be published in the newly formed state of California and the first novel published by a Native author, Amy Gore calls attention to the negotiations between books and bodies embedded within Indigenous literary history. Bringing Indigenous book history more firmly into conversations with mainstream narratives about the history of the book, her research claims books themselves as a source of embodied power for early Native American authors.
A virtual presentation by Amy Gore, author and assistant professor of English, North Dakota State University
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312 Sutter Street, Suite 500 • San Francisco, California 94108 • t. 415 781 7532 • 