5:30 PM Pacific – Reception
6:00 PM Pacific – Program
In popular mythology, the Overland Trail is typically a triumphant tale, with plucky easterners crossing the Plains in caravans of covered wagons. But not everyone reached Oregon and California. Some 6,600 migrants perished along the way and were buried where they fell, often on Indigenous land. As historian Sarah Keyes illuminates, their graves ultimately became the seeds of U.S. expansion.
By the 1850s, cholera epidemics, ordinary diseases, and violence had remade the Trail into an American burial ground that imbued migrant deaths with symbolic power. In subsequent decades, U.S. officials and citizens leveraged Trail graves to claim Native ground. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples pointed to their own sacred burial grounds to dispute these same claims and maintain their land. These efforts built on anti-removal campaigns of the 1820s and 30s, which had established the link between death and territorial claims on which the significance of the Overland Trail came to rest.
In placing death at the center of the history of the Overland Trail, American Burial Ground offers a sweeping and long overdue reinterpretation of this historic touchstone. In this telling, westward migration was a harrowing journey weighed down by the demands of caring for the sick and dying. From a tale of triumph comes one of struggle, defined as much by Indigenous peoples’ actions as it was by white expansion. And, finally, from a migration to the Pacific emerges instead a trail of graves. Graves that ultimately undergirded Native dispossession.
An in-person and virtual presentation by Sarah Keyes, author, historian, and assistant professor of history, University of Nevada, Reno
Registration for in-person attendance has closed.
5:30 PM Pacific – Reception
6:00 PM Pacific – Program
Pasadena Heritage | 160 N Oakland Avenue | Pasadena, California 91101
Set against the glittering backdrop of Los Angeles during the gin-soaked Jazz Age and the rise of Hollywood, this debut book celebrates Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie star, to bring an unsung heroine to light and reclaim her place in cinema history.
Before Constance Wu, Sandra Oh, Awkwafina, or Lucy Liu, there was Anna May Wong. In her time, she was a legendary beauty, witty conversationalist, and fashion icon. Plucked from her family’s laundry business in Los Angeles, Anna May Wong rose to stardom in Douglas Fairbanks’s blockbuster The Thief of Bagdad. Fans and the press clamored to see more of this unlikely actress, but when Hollywood repeatedly cast her in stereotypical roles, she headed abroad in protest.
Anna May starred in acclaimed films in Berlin, Paris, and London. She dazzled royalty and heads of state across several nations, leaving trails of suitors in her wake. She returned to challenge Hollywood at its own game by speaking out about the industry’s blatant racism. She used her new stature to move away from her typecasting as the China doll or dragon lady, and worked to reshape Asian American representation in film.
Filled with stories of capricious directors and admiring costars, glamorous parties and far-flung love affairs, Not Your China Doll showcases the vibrant, radical life of a groundbreaking artist.
An in-person presentation by Katie Gee Salisbury, author and photographer
Click here to REGISTER to attend in-person at Pasadena Heritage
5:00 PM Pacific – Program
Author Donna J. Nicol tells the extraordinary story of Dr. Claudia H. Hampton, the California State University (CSU) system’s first Black woman trustee, who later became the board’s first woman chair, and her twenty-year fight (1974–94) to increase access within the CSU for historically marginalized and underrepresented groups. Amid a growing white backlash against changes brought on by the 1960s Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, Nicol argues that Hampton enacted “sly civility” to persuade fellow trustees, CSU system officials, and state lawmakers to enforce federal and state affirmative action mandates.
Black Woman on Board explores how Hampton methodically “played the game of boardsmanship,” using the soft power she cultivated amongst her peers to remove barriers that might have impeded the implementation and expansion of affirmative action policies and programs. In illuminating the ways that Hampton transformed the CSU as the “affirmative action trustee,” this remarkable book makes an important contribution to the history of higher education and to the historiography of Black women’s educational leadership in the post-Civil Rights era.
A virtual presentation by Dr. Donna J. Nicol, associate dean, College of Liberal Arts, California State University, Long Beach, CA
5:00 PM Pacific – Program
Before Amazon, before big box stores, and even before mailboxes sagged under the weight of catalogs in the mid-20th century, customers and shop-owners alike turned to a wide variety of media to select their purchases, and to aspire to grander lifestyles. Trade cards, trade catalogs, advertising ephemera, and sales samples illuminate the art of buying, selling, and dreaming in the past, painting a picture of the everyday lives of Americans as consumers. These items can be quite beautiful – they were created to facilitate sales, after all – and reflect broader aesthetic trends, as well as advertising styles, cultural values, and the distribution of products historically. And beyond its intended use as a promotional tool, trade media often found a second life at the hands of 19th century scrapbookers.
The dynamic nature of trade material makes it a valuable tool for research, as well as creative inspiration. The Winterthur Library, located outside Wilmington, Delaware, holds a vibrant and vast collection of such trade material, including fabric swatch books, hand-drawn watercolor catalogs, engraved promotional cards, chromolithographed labels, and more – hundreds of thousands of items. Join Winterthur Library Curator of Special Collections Allie Alvis as they journey through 400 years of advertising and promotion in America and Europe, highlighting some of the wonderful (and sometimes weird) trade treasures from the library’s collection and presenting them in the broader milieu of material culture.
A virtual presentation by Alexandra Alvis, book historian and curator, special collections, Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library
California, a Slave State
Monday, July 15, 2024, 5-6:15 PM (Pacific)
| Virtual Presentation
5:00 PM Pacific – Program
California owes its origins and sunny prosperity to slavery. Spanish invaders captured Indigenous people to build the chain of Catholic missions. Russian otter hunters shipped Alaska Natives—the first slaves transported into California—and launched a Pacific slave triangle to China. Plantation slaves were marched across the plains for the Gold Rush. San Quentin Prison incubated California’s carceral state. Kidnapped Chinese girls were sold in caged brothels in early San Francisco. Indian boarding schools supplied new farms and hotels with unfree child workers.
By looking west to California, Jean Pfaelzer upends our understanding of slavery as a North-South struggle and reveals how the enslaved in California fought, fled, and resisted human bondage. In unyielding research and vivid interviews, Pfaelzer exposes how California gorged on slavery, an appetite that persists today in a global trade in human beings lured by promises of jobs but who instead are imprisoned in sweatshops and remote marijuana grows, or sold as nannies and sex workers.
A virtual presentation by Jean Pfaelzer, author and professor emerita of English and American Studies, University of Delaware
5:30 PM Pacific – Reception
6:00 PM Pacific – Program
Pasadena Heritage | 160 N Oakland Avenue | Pasadena, California 91101
Five generations of Judsons have worked with artists, architects, and designers to create Old World-style stained glass whose quality and craftsmanship has often been compared to the work of Louis Tiffany. Famed for its Craftsman glass, Judson arts-and-crafts era windows have been celebrated by experts in the field for decades. Judson’s work with Frank Lloyd Wright on Hollyhock House in the 1920s was recently re-saluted when the house was named to the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list. Established in Pasadena during the heyday of the Arroyo Culture, headquarters of Judson Studios are still housed in the original Craftsman-era home and studio of patriarch William Lees Judson.
Much of Judson’s finest early work was installed in religious buildings. Along with the studio’s numerous institutional and residential projects, JUDSON: Innovation in Stained Glass illustrates fine work in churches dating back to the early twentieth century. Modern work is also featured, including the extraordinary Air Force Academy Chapel in Colorado Springs, completed in 1962, a mid-century wonder whose soaring panels of color introduced an architecturally mesmerizing approach to stained glass that had never been executed before.
Once Judson Studios developed methods for blending subtle variations of color in glass for the Church of the Resurrection window, the possibilities of glass as an artist’s medium were apparent. Now, in addition to its work in traditional leaded stained glass, Judson Studios is working with fine artists creating effects in fused glass that were previously unachievable. Most recently, fine artist Sarah Cain worked with Judson Studios to create a work in glass 10 feet high by 150 feet long; it was installed at the San Francisco International Airport in July 2019.
An in-person presentation by David Judson, author and president of Judson Studios
Click here to REGISTER to attend in-person at Pasadena Heritage
5:00 PM Pacific – Program
For more than twenty years, the Los Angeles Times columnist Al Martinez (1929-2015) delighted, and enriched the lives of, thousands of readers across southern California. An Oakland native, he attended San Francisco State College. Later, he was a reporter for the Richmond Independent and the Oakland Tribune before being lured to Los Angeles to write for the Times. By the time he retired in 2009, he had earned an extensive array of awards and honors, including three shared Pulitzers and the National Headliner Award for the best column in the U.S.
Before becoming a professional journalist, Martinez served in the Korean War at the age of 21 with the U.S. Marines, from 1951-1952, first on the battle front and then as a war correspondent. He dispatched letters almost daily to his young bride Joanne.
Now a volume of Al Martinez’ Korean War letters, I Promise You I’ll Be Home, has been published by McFarland and Co. Written from the unique perspective of an obviously gifted professional writer at the beginning of his career, his letters home capture his experiences eloquently and with depth of understanding as they express the dangers, hardships, fear, friendships, and even humor of life at the front. His vivid, often humorous pen-and-ink drawings portray scenes from the front lines.
The letters are all housed in the archive of his papers at The Huntington Library. They form not only an important record for the history of the largely ignored Korean War, but also a crackling good narrative of one Marine’s time at the battle front and as a combat correspondent. Even as a young writer, he was among the very best in storytelling and in the elegance of his prose.
A virtual presentation by Sara S. Hodson, author and retired curator of literary collections for The Huntington Library
5:00 PM Pacific – Program
America’s suburbs have been transforming. The conventional story of suburbs as bastions of white, middle-class homeowners no longer describes suburban realities. Today they house a more typical cross-section of the nation—rich, poor, Black American, Latino, Asian, immigrant, the unhoused, the lavishly housed, and everyone in between. Stories of everyday suburban life, in the process, have taken on new inflections.
Nowhere are these changes more vivid than in Los Angeles. In this suburban metropolis and global powerhouse, lily white suburbs have virtually disappeared, and over two-thirds of the County’s suburbs have become majority minority, placing LA at the vanguard of national changes. In Los Angeles, suburban diversification happened earlier and more intensively, offering a glimpse into what may well be America’s future. In The New Suburbia, historian Becky Nicolaides follows the Asian Americans, Black Americans, and Latinos who moved into white neighborhoods that once barred them. They bought homes, enrolled their children in schools, and began navigating suburban life. In places like Pasadena, San Marino, South Gate, and Lakewood, suburbanites faced the challenges of living together in difference. In some communities, diverse residents continued longstanding habits of exclusion and perpetuated metropolitan inequality. In others, they embraced more inclusive, multicultural suburban ideals. Through it all, the common denominators of suburbia remained—low-slung landscapes of single-family homes and families seeking the good life.
Based on a half-century of quantitative data and unpublished oral histories and interviews, The New Suburbia explores vital landscapes where the American dream has endured, even as the dreamers have changed.
A virtual presentation by Becky N. Nicolaides, author, historian, and Research Affiliate at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West
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
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
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
5:00 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
5:30 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 – 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
5:00 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 **
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.
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 **
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
47 Kearny Street, Suite 400 • San Francisco, California 94108 • t. 415 781 7532 • 