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Event Types: Event

Digger Do: Excavating a Social Movement Through Its Print Ephemera

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 — through the lens of its printed traces. […]

The Man Who Dammed Hetch Hetchy: John R. Freeman and San Francisco’s Yosemite Water Supply

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 […]

Thomas Clarkson’s Latin Essay: The Origins and Legacy of an Antislavery Text

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” since 1786, their work explores in depth […]

Inventing Paradise: The Power Brokers Who Created the Dream of Los Angeles

Inventing Paradise: The Power Brokers Who Created the Dream of Los Angeles traces the improbable rise of Los Angeles through the prism of six visionaries who had outsize influence on the city’s growth: Phineas Banning, Harrison Gray Otis, Henry Huntington, Harry Chandler, William Mulholland, and Moses Sherman. In the late 1870s, Los Angeles was a […]

Exhibition Opening: Folklore, Fairy Tales, and Other Worlds

Folklore and fairy tales have been intertwined throughout their history, with early fairy tales deriving from the oral tradition before moving into the world of printed literature, and literary stories shifting back into the spoken realm. These tales are infused with mystical and mythical traits, while their traditional elements gave rise to new and otherworldly […]

The Binfords & Mort Story: Publishing Books About Oregon, 1930-1983

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 of the Mississippi, cast a large shadow […]

The Binfords & Mort Story: Publishing Books About Oregon, 1930-1983

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 of the Mississippi, cast a large shadow […]

City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry

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 build the regional metropolis of […]