Event: Bancroft Round Table on Thursday, October 17

Please join us for the second Bancroft Round Table of the 2013-2014 academic year in the Lewis Latimer Room of The Faculty Club at 12:00 p.m. on Thursday, October 17.

Jason Bezis, a Boalt Hall graduate who is currently working on a biography of Thomas Kuchel, will present “Thomas Kuchel: California’s Liberal Republican Senator.”

Thomas Kuchel was a liberal Republican U.S. Senator for California in the 1950s and ‘60s whose career spanned the Hiram Johnson to Ronald Reagan eras. The talk will focus on the fundamental tensions in his policy work: (1) advocating civil rights and defending his mentor Earl Warren against the John Birch Society and other reactionary forces, (2) balancing California’s physical development with natural resources conservation, and (3) promoting California’s Cold War military-industrial complex (the backbone of the state’s manufacturing economy) while constraining it. His paternal grandfather was among the German emigrants who founded Anaheim in Orange County. Kuchel was the Bancroft Library’s keynote speaker in 1968, the University of California’s centennial year.

You can also plan ahead to attend the final Bancroft Round Table of the fall semester, which will take place on Thursday, November 21st. It will feature Johanna Gosse (Bryn Mawr College PhD candidate in the History of Art) presenting a talk entitled “Fallout Films: Bruce Conner’s Atomic Sublime, 1958-1976.”

Lara Michels and Baiba Strads
Bancroft Library Staff