Refusing Settler Domesticity: Native Women’s Labor and Resistance in the Bay Area Outing Program
In the early twentieth century, the Bay Area Outing Program coercively recruited over a thousand Native girls and women from boarding schools to labor as live-in domestic workers across the San Francisco Bay Area. In exchange for room, board, and meager pay, Native women and girls as young as twelve cooked, cleaned, and lived in […]
Excavating and Reckoning with California’s Sorrowful Past
Two publications, both published by Heyday, bookend and frame Tony Platt’s talk. One book begins in a remote area of northwest California, the other in the Bay Area’s metropolis. In Grave Matters: The Controversy over Excavating California’s Buried Indigenous Past (2011, 202) Platt investigated the global trade in everything Indian that during the late nineteenth […]
Elements of Los Angeles: Earth, Water, Air, Fire
Using the four classical elements as his structure, Waldie delves into the complex essence of Los Angeles—a city of natural beauty and environmental precarity, of dreams pursued and illusions faded. In Elements of Los Angeles, Waldie has assembled a panorama of a city both tragic and intensely moving. With his signature clarity and compassion, he […]
High Spirits: The Legacy Bars of San Francisco
Community, heritage, architecture—oh yes, and stiff pours: these are the hallmarks of San Francisco’s Legacy Bars. High Spirits leads readers on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood pub crawl in search of the city’s most remarkable nightspots. Atmospheric photographs accompany descriptions of each bar’s colorful history, unique architectural features, idiosyncratic owners, and quirky clientele. As we dip into one […]
Postcards and the Baja California Border Towns
Postcards have a magical pull. They allow us to see the past through charming relics that allow us to travel back in time. Daniel D. Arreola’s Postcards from the Baja California Border offers a window into the historical and geographical past of storied Mexican border communities. Once-popular tourist destinations from the 1900s through the 1950s, […]
Cruising J-Town
Cruising J-Town: Japanese American Car Culture in Los Angeles explores how generations of Japanese Americans in Southern California shaped, and were shaped by, local automobile cultures and industries, from desert lakebeds to concrete speedways, gas stations to design centers, souped-up import tuners to humble gardening trucks. Along the way, cars and trucks became literal and […]
Citizen-Collectors in the Cultural Artifacts Ecosystem
Where do significant collections come from? They start when ordinary people develop a passion for a subject or object. They begin to add more items, filling in gaps and improving examples they have. They become subject matter experts in a narrow field. Small collections grow into larger ones until eventually dealers and institutions get involved. […]
Tribute to Truman Capote / Breakfast at Tiffany’s Bookplate Competition
2024 marked the centenary celebration of Truman Capote (1924-1984) — the famed American novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and actor. Several of his short stories, novels, and plays have become literary classics, including his 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Selections from the American Society of Bookplate Collectors & Designers’ International Bookplate Competition to honor Truman Capote and […]
Unholy Sensations: A Story of Sex, Scandal, and California’s First Cult Scare
In 1891, a suffragist and social reformer named Alzire Chevaillier launched a moral crusade to destroy Fountaingrove, a utopian spiritualist community in northern California. Chevaillier accused the colony’s leader, the poet and prophet Thomas Lake Harris, of perverting the teachings of the Bible to promote a “new sexology” that was “worse than Mormonism.” Media reports […]
On Collecting the Imaginary
Curator Reid Byers will give a talk, “Collecting the Imaginary (in which all will be revealed),” in conjunction with his Book Club exhibition, “Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Books Found Only in Other Books.” The talk will deal with the curious issues surrounding the acquisition of immaterial and imaginary items for collections. On view […]