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Book Anatomy: Body Politics and the Materiality of Indigenous Book History
Monday, June 17, 2024, 5-6:15 PM (Pacific)
| Virtual Presentation “]
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
Click here to REGISTER for the Virtual Presentation on Zoom
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[toggle title=”Santa Monica Pier: America’s Last Great Pleasure Pier
Wednesday, June 12, 2024, 6-7:15 PM (Pacific)
| In-Person Presentation”]
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
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[toggle title=”Ellen Browning Scripps: New Money and American Philanthropy, 1836-1932
Monday, June 10, 2024, 5-6:15 PM (Pacific)
| Virtual Presentation “]
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
Click here to REGISTER for the Virtual Presentation on Zoom
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[toggle title=”Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles
Monday, May 13, 2024, 5-6:15 PM (Pacific)
| Virtual Presentation “]
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
Click here to REGISTER for the Virtual Presentation on Zoom
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[toggle title=”Terminal Island: Lost Communities on America’s Edge
Wednesday, May 8, 2024, 6-7:15 PM (Pacific)
| In-Person Presentation”]
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
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[toggle title=”2024 Oscar Lewis Awards
Monday, May 6, 2024, 6-7:15 PM (Pacific)
| In-Person and Virtual Presentation “]
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
Click here to REGISTER for the Virtual Presentation on Zoom
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[toggle title=”Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West
Monday, April 15, 2024, 5-6:15 PM (Pacific)
| Virtual Presentation “]
5:00 PM Pacific – Program
An archive survives to be revived. The archive as a limit, a thing in a box, is always also an opening. It opens on losses sustained, harms inflicted, the tenacity of survival, and on the persistence of lineages both proud and shameful. But what is it to approach an archive, to unlock the cabinet, lift the top off the box, to begin to read? It is to invite a haunting, which nevertheless begins long before we open any books. And to invite the ghosts into the open, one must be ready to hear what they teach.
Reading from her new book, Mud, Blood, and Ghosts, and screening a short film by Carolina Ebeid that engages archival images, Julie Carr will tell the story of her great-grandfather, Omer Madison Kem, a settler in Nebraska, a founding member of the Populist Party, a three-term Congressman, a practicing spiritualist, and an avid eugenicist. Kem’s final years were spent in Oregon where he owned a power company and became a passionate advocate for the forced sterilization of all those he came to believe were “unfit” to breed. This talk will focus on the ties between the American eugenics movement, American populism, and the American West.
A virtual presentation by Julie Carr, author and professor of English, University of Colorado, Boulder
Click here to REGISTER for the Virtual Presentation on Zoom
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[toggle title=”California and Reframing the Making of a Modern U.S. West
Monday, April 8, 2024, 5-6:15 PM (Pacific)
| Virtual Presentation “]
5:00 PM Pacific – Program
A central theme of Making a Modern U.S. West by Sarah Deutsch is the question of what would constitute a modern U.S. and whose vision would define the West and the nation. Modernity for some meant corporate consolidation, capital intensive agriculture, white supremacy, male-headed families and private individual land-holding. For others, modernity could include racial mixing, transnational mobility, economic democracy, and collective ownership of land. Californians ran the full spectrum of these ideas—they fought over redwoods and irrigation, they speculated on land and oil, they fought over the border and who belonged on which side, and even over who should get a say in all those things—and in doing so, they helped define modernity for the region and the nation.
This presentation will address some of those issues as well as how the author tried to corral these unwieldy decades into a single volume.
A virtual presentation by Sarah Deutsch, author and professor of history, Duke University
Click here to REGISTER for the Virtual Presentation on Zoom
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[toggle title=”An Evening at the Quasi-Library
Tuesday, April 2, 2024, 6:30-7:45 PM (Pacific)
| In-Person Presentation”]
6:30 PM Pacific – Program
ArtCenter College of Design | South Campus, 1111 South Arroyo Parkway | 5th Floor Lobby | Pasadena, California 91105
Join guest librarian Alex Balgiu (Designing Writing), alongside Rachel Julius and Bob Dirig (ArtCenter Library) for an immersive and tactile happening where attendees will interact directly with the diverse array of books and printed materials on display.
** Co-presented by Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography and ArtCenter Graphic Design
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[toggle title=”Redemptive Dreams: Engaging Kevin Starr’s California
Monday, March 18, 2024, 6-7:15 PM (Pacific)
| In-Person and Virtual Presentation “]
5:30 PM Pacific – Reception
6:00 PM Pacific – Program
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 thousands of published articles and essays, often puzzled historians and other scholars. Historians in the contemporary school of critical historiography often found Starr’s narrative approach—seeking to tell the internal drama of the California story—to be less attuned to the most important work happening in the field. Such a perspective fails to acknowledge key developments in historical subfields like Black and African American Studies, Chicana/o/x Studies, Asian Studies, Native Studies, and others that draw from the narrative in their critical work and how this relates to Starr’s contribution. Along with being a major figure in California institutional life, with literary output spanning genres, it is through the lens of his lived experience as a devout Catholic that this critical sociological perspective sheds new light on his project. With contributions from sociology, history, and theology, akin to investigations appearing in Theology and California: Theological Refractions on California’s Culture (Routledge), Redemptive Dreams offers interdisciplinary perspectives that highlight key features inherent in interdisciplinary theological reflection on place and illuminates these diverse disciplinary discourses as they appear in Starr’s articulation of the California Dream.
An in-person and virtual presentation by Jason S. Sexton, author and professor of sociology at University of California, Los Angeles
Click here to REGISTER to attend in-person at The Book Club of California
Click here to REGISTER for the Virtual Presentation on Zoom
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[toggle title=”Clubhouse Turn: The Twilight of Hollywood Park Race Track
Wednesday, March 13, 2024, 6-7:15 PM (Pacific)
| In-Person Presentation”]
5:30 PM Pacific – Reception
6:00 PM Pacific – Program
Pasadena Heritage | 160 N Oakland Avenue | Pasadena, California 91101
Constructed on a swampy landmass in Inglewood, Hollywood Park Racetrack was envisioned by entertainment moguls. Inglewood welcomed the executives, who had been excluded from other venues due to prejudice. The first turn on a racetrack immediately after the finish line, known as the clubhouse turn, is considered to be the best vantage point to see the finish of the race and is therefore where the privileged sit. Built with the values of a bygone era and the mythologies of the track, Hollywood Park was a place where the privileged and disenfranchised co-mingled; it epitomized the social complexity of a place of fantasy and dreams, winning and losing. Clubhouse Turn strives to produce a pictorial record of the inevitable amalgamation of imagined and actual realities, environment and circumstance. By grouping the images into framed constructions, the work functions like memory—consolidating, diffusing, and reorganizing what has now disappeared.
An in-person presentation by Michele Asselin, editorial photographer and author
Click here to REGISTER to attend in-person at Pasadena Heritage
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[toggle title=”Empress San Francisco: The Pacific Rim, The Great West, and California at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition
Monday, March 11, 2024, 6-7:15 PM (Pacific)
| In-Person and Virtual Presentation “]
5:30 PM Pacific – Reception
6:00 PM Pacific – Program
When the more than 18 million visitors poured into the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) in San Francisco in 1915, they encountered a vision of the world born out of San Francisco’s particular local political and social climate. By seeking to please various constituent groups ranging from the government of Japan to local labor unions and neighborhood associations, fair organizers generated heated debate and conflict about who and what represented San Francisco, California, and the United States at the world’s fair. The PPIE encapsulated the social and political tensions and conflicts of pre–World War I California and presaged the emergence of San Francisco as a cosmopolitan cultural and economic center of the Pacific Rim.
Empress San Francisco offers a fresh examination of this, one of the largest and most influential world’s fairs, by considering the local social and political climate of Progressive Era San Francisco. Focusing on the influence exerted by women, Asians and Asian Americans, and working-class labor unions, among others, Abigail M. Markwyn offers a unique analysis both of this world’s fair and the social construction of pre–World War I America and the West.
An in-person and virtual presentation by Abigail M. Markwyn, author and professor of history at Carroll University
Click here to REGISTER to attend in-person at The Book Club of California
Click here to REGISTER for the Virtual Presentation on Zoom
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[toggle title=”Bibliophiles Beware: The Situationist International and the Art & Politics of Cultural Hijacking
Monday, March 4, 2024, 6-7:15 PM (Pacific)
| In-Person and Virtual Presentation “]
5:30 PM Pacific – Reception
6:00 PM Pacific – Exhibition Opening and Remarks
Active between 1957 and 1972, The Situationist International (S.I.) was a revolutionary alliance of artists, intellectuals, architects and political theorists that is hailed as the “last avant-garde” of the 20th century. One of the organization’s core concepts is that of détournement, which can be understood as the subversion of established cultural commodities as a means of propaganda. This exhibition presents numerous examples of this innovative practice, from artist books to comic strips, and from leaflets to maps. In doing so, it also attempts to retrace the history of a movement that maintained an ambiguous relationship with their own material productions.
Exhibition opening and remarks by Mehdi El Hajoui, private collector.
Click here to REGISTER to attend in-person at The Book Club of California
Click here to REGISTER for the Virtual Presentation on Zoom
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[toggle title=”The Life, Motto, and Library of William Walker (1570-1642), Vicar of Chiswick
Monday, February 12, 2024, 6-7:15 PM (Pacific)
| In-Person and Virtual Presentation “]
5:30 PM Pacific – Reception
6:00 PM Pacific – Program
Approximately twenty-five printed books and ten manuscripts have been located from before 1640 which bear the florid inscription: “Will and Walke aright. Will: Walker,” usually appearing on the title-page of a printed book, or on the first or last leaf of a manuscript.
This talk will attempt to identify the author of the inscription and the owner of the books and manuscripts in new detail; to reconstruct William Walker’s small but unquestionably significant personal library; and to trace the history of the “best” manuscript of Sir Philip Sidney’s “Old Arcadia.”
An in-person and virtual presentation by Alan H. Nelson, Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of California, Berkeley
** Co-presented and co-hosted by The American Trust for the British Library and The Bibliographical Society of America **
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[toggle title=”Print Your Own Broadside Affair
Monday, January 29, 2024, 6-7:15 PM (Pacific)
| In-Person Presentation”]
5:30 PM Pacific – Reception
6:00 PM Pacific – Program
Letterpress print your own broadside on the Book Club’s Colombian hand press with Li Jiang, Lemoncheese Press.
A limited number of broadsides will be printed. Registration required.
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[toggle title=”The Newly Discovered Notebook of Isaac Newton
Wednesday, January 17, 2024, 6-7:15 PM (Pacific)
| In-Person and Virtual Presentation “]
5:30 PM Pacific – Reception
6:00 PM Pacific – Program
The Cambridge University Library recently purchased a previously unknown notebook kept by Isaac Newton’s chamber-fellow, John Wickins, in the years around 1680. It is possible to identify the contents of the notebook as being previously unknown compositions and correspondence of Isaac Newton, which shed light on many aspects of his work and his engagement with the University in which he was employed.
As part of the preparation of an edition of the notebook, the evidence that it provides for Newton’s reading habits has been extensively investigated and this talk will describe that evidence and the conclusions that can be drawn from it and from other sources to trace changes in Newton’s habits of study at a critical juncture in the development of his thought.
An in-person and virtual presentation by Scott Mandelbrote, Fellow, Director of Studies in History, and Perne and Ward Librarian, at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, UK. He is also the editorial director of the Newton Project.
** Co-presented and co-hosted by The American Trust for the British Library and The Bibliographical Society of America **
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[toggle title=”The Orange and the Dream of California
Wednesday, January 10, 2024, 6-7:15 PM (Pacific)
| In-Person Presentation”]
5:30 PM Pacific – Reception
6:00 PM Pacific – Program
The Blinn House | 160 N Oakland Avenue | Pasadena, California 91101
The Orange and the Dream of California takes a lively, literary, and extraordinarily visual look at the symbiotic and highly symbolic relationship between the Golden State and its “golden apple.” Untold thousands of adventurers and health-seekers came West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, lured by postcards of orange blossoms juxtaposed to snow-capped mountains. Orange juice became the way to start every day after Sunkist spread the word that drinking a California orange was not only as sweet and delicious as eating one, but held the promise to a healthy life. The orange became a symbol of everything California promised, and California became the center of the Orange Empire.
In 176 full-color pages and more than 250 images, author David Boulé shares the absorbing story of the orange and its impact on the culture—historic, financial, artistic, and even romantic—of California. And, he tells the tale of citriculture, the complex, captivating, and controversial world of growing the orange.
An in-person presentation by David Boulé, author and historian
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