Author: leeadams
Bear in Mind: The California Grizzly at The Bancroft Library
Looking Backward, Looking Forward: Visions of the Golden State
This exhibition looks at four key events and celebrations in California during the last 150 years of statehood and examines a few aspects of California's unique development, noting accomplishments as well as a few missteps. The exhibition begins with the Constitutional Convention and California's campaign for statehood in 1850; then looks at two grand world's fairs: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 and The Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939; and ends with the celebration of California First Days, 1962-63, when California overtook New York as the most populous state in the Union. California has been perceived by many as the embodiment of "progress," a place that not only looks towards the future but also shapes it.
Building Bancroft: The Evolution of a Library
New Online Exhibitions
Building Bancroft: The Evolution of a Library presents the documentary history of The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. The exhibit traces the development of The Bancroft Library, from its beginnings as the personal collection of businessman and historian Hubert Howe Bancroft to its current role as one of the premiere archival and special collections repositories in the nation. Documents, photographs, illustrations, and other materials offer an introduction to more than one hundred and fifty years in the life of The Bancroft Library.
The University at the Turn of the Century: 1899-1900
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Bridging the Bay: Bridging the Campus
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At a time when the Bay Area’s bridges are being analyzed and new structures are being planned, it is important to recognize the diversity and depth of the research collections that exist on the Berkeley campus. The exhibit includes books, documents, architectural drawings and renderings, blueprints, artifacts, maps, and photographs. The bridges documented include the Golden Gate Bridge, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, the Carquinez Bridge, the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, the Antioch Bridge, and the Dumbarton Bridge. The exhibit also contains documents detailing Bay Area bridge projects that were seriously considered, but were never built. |
The Lehmer Family at Berkeley
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Selections from the University Archives of The Bancroft Library |
Roma Pacifica: The Phoebe Hearst International Architectural Competition and the Berkeley Campus, 1896-1930
Mark Twain at Large: His Travels Here and Abroad
In 1853, at the age of seventeen, Samuel Langhorne Clemens left his home in Hannibal, Missouri, for his first extended trip. Over the next fifty-seven years he crisscrossed the globe, at first working as an itinerant typesetter in several major eastern cities, then as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, and later as a prospector and newspaper reporter on the American frontier, where he first used the pseudonym "Mark Twain." He made one-night lecture stops at hundreds of small towns, settled down for months in hotels and rented villas in England and Europe, escaped life's hurly-burly on tropical isles, and basked in society's limelight in many of the world's great cities. He visited five continents, steamed across the Atlantic twenty-nine times, and crossed the Pacific and Indian oceans as part of one complete round-the-world circuit.