Tomorrow is Another Day: Bestselling Novels of the Great Depression Era
As a counterpart to research on the 1930s that has focused on liberal and radical writers calling for social revolution, David Welky offers this eloquent study of how mainstream print culture shaped and disseminated a message affirming conservative middle-class values and assuring its readers that holding to these values would get them through hard times. […]
Performing Chinatown: Hollywood, Tourism, and the Making of a Chinese American Community
In 1938, China City opened near downtown Los Angeles. Featuring a recreation of the House of Wang set from MGM’s The Good Earth, this new Chinatown employed many of the same Chinese Americans who performed as background extras in the 1937 film. Chinatown and Hollywood represented the two primary sites where Chinese Americans performed racial […]
Larry McMurtry’s Runaways: The Story of Larry McMurtry’s Collection of Books by Women Travelers
In 1960 the aspiring Texas writer Larry McMurtry enrolled in Stanford University with a fellowship in the Stegner creative writing program. Along with his studies, McMurtry became immersed in the world of antiquarian and used bookshops that flourished during that time in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it became an infatuation that, along with […]
In Case You Missed It: Counterculture Photography of the 1960s and 1970s
In Case You Missed It: Counterculture Photography of the 1960s and 1970s presents a stunning portrait of an era that lit up briefly but brightly—Los Angeles in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Capturing the imagination of modern filmmakers and cultural tastemakers, this period of iconic imagery, changing social landscape, and free love in Los […]
The Sunday Paper: A Media History
The American Sunday paper of the 1890s transformed the daily edition with inserts and supplements of all shapes and sizes. Each asked readers to do more than read, but to interact with the materiality of the paper as a form of leisure. The Sunday paper became so large and voluminous it needed to be organized: […]
Digital Literary Redlining: African American Anthologies, Digital Humanities, and the Canon
Though canon concerns seem to be a relic of 1990s academia, we are, once again, at a historical moment when there is resistance to teaching texts by writers of color and texts that deal with race, ethnicity and gender. At the same time, algorithmic bias scholars are locating systemic bias encoded into systems from policing […]
The California Camera Club: Collective Visions in the Making of the American West
With some 400 members, the San Francisco-based California Camera Club was the largest photography network in the United States in the early twentieth century. In her book The California Camera Club, Carolin Görgen recaptures the lost history of this community—both women and men—and their crucial contribution to shaping the cultural imagination of California and the […]
Exploring LA History Through Its Literary Landmarks
We often think of Los Angeles as a city defined by the film industry. But books, writing and printing have shaped LA in profound ways, too. And if you know where to look, you can trace the impact of LA’s literary legacy in its built environment. Los Angeles native Etan Rosenbloom is on a quest […]
Black Wests: Reshaping Race and Place in Popular Culture
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 in Popular Culture brings those histories […]
Exhibition Opening: Serving the Community: The Junior League Cookbook— Regional Cookbooks, Historical Monographs, Programs, and Guidebooks
This exhibit showcases the rare, early publications of the Association of Junior Leagues International, Inc. and includes the self-published and now very collectible material produced by the women of The Junior League from the early 1920s to the early 2000s. The graphic designs of the covers and the illustrations within reflect the age and decade—from […]