Author: Lee Anne Titangos
The Bancroft Library will be CLOSED May 21st – June 6th
The Bancroft Library Reading Room will be CLOSED from May 21st to June 6th. The stacks will be undergoing construction, and Bancroft material will not be accessible at that time. Please plan your research accordingly.
Intersession hours of Monday – Friday, 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm, will resume on June 7th.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Webcast of the Sixty-Third Annual Meeting of the Friends of The Bancroft Library
The webcast of the Sixty-Third Annual Meeting of the Friends of The Bancroft Library is now available for viewing online. Click here to watch the presentation of the Hubert Howe Bancroft Award to Dr. W. Michael Mathes, Historian of Mexico, along with the presentation of Graduate and Undergraduate Fellowships and Prizes.
Roundtable: Popular science at Berkeley and the long history of American Studies
May 20th, Faculty Club
12pm
Led by Alex Olson, Gunther Barth Fellowship recipient, Ph.D. candidate in the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan
The final Bancroft Round Table of the Spring Semester will take place at noon on Thursday, May 20, in the Lewis-Latimer Room of the Faculty Club. Alex Olson, Gunther Barth Fellowship recipient and Ph.D. candidate in the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan will give a talk entitled: Popular Science at Berkeley and the Long History of American Studies.
Although the emergence of the field of American Studies is commonly traced to a cohort of 1940s historians and literary scholars, it cannot be fully understood without also acknowledging some lesser-known antecedents in public scholarship, popular science, and various other educational reform schemes. Using Berkeley as a case study, this talk reconsiders American Studies as part of a longer critical tradition that accompanied the rise of modern academic disciplines. The Bancroft Library’s extensive holdings on early-twentieth-century California intellectual history, including the papers of Joseph LeConte, Charles Keeler, and William Ritter, are rich sources for studying these developments.
As spring’s Final Examinations reach their end, the entire campus community is welcome to join us to learn more about the University of California’s 19th-century efforts to make scholarship relevant to everyday life. Bancroft Round Tables aim to acquaint the community with the varied resources of The Bancroft Library.
Roundtable: Migrating Mexico: A material history of remittance space in Sur de Jalisco, Mexico and California, USA
April 15th, Faculty Club
12pm
Led by Sarah Lopez, Bancroft Study Award recipient, Ph.D. candidate in Architecture at UC Berkeley
For almost a century, Mexican migrants have been sending money from one locality to another to sustain the livelihood of family members in Mexico and to build houses, roads, orphanages and schools in their hometowns. This talk outlines a historical genealogy of remittances between Jalisco, Mexico and California, USA in an attempt to understand how American dollars have impacted the material, social and cultural landscapes of Jalisco.
Few topics are as politically contentious as those involving the flow of people, goods and money back and forth across the southern border of the United States. Please come and join us at this exploratory historical case study of the impact of such interaction on two specific places. This research makes use of the many collections at Bancroft (such as the Paul S. Taylor and Manuel Gamio) which document migrant labor. Bancroft Round Tables aim to showcase the relevance of our collections to the study of contemporary society.
Webcast of the Sesquicentennial Symposium is now online
“The Bancroft Library at 150: A Sesquicentennial Symposium” is now avialable for viewing online.
Please click here to view the webcast.
Fighting Nazism with Words: Dutch Clandestine Literature Under the Nazi Occupation
April 1 – August 31, 2010
The Bernice Layne Brown Gallery, The Doe Library
This exhibit highlights The Bancroft Library’s collection of “illegal” books and pamphlets published clandestinely during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II.
An accompanying lecture and reception on April 15 will feature the noted Iranian-Dutch author Kader Abdolah.
The exhibit is open during the operating hours of The Doe Library.
Fighting Nazism with the printed word
“Resonating through a new Doe Library exhibit of Dutch art and literature published in defiance of Nazi suppression is the knowledge that, more than a half-century later, persecution, prison and even execution can still be the price of words printed on paper. On display in the glass cases in Doe’s foyer, under the banner “Fighting Nazism With Words,” are some 100 pamphlets, books, broadsides, posters, prints and drawings selected from the Bancroft Library’s extraordinary collection of what’s known as Dutch clandestine literature. Berkeley has one of the largest collections of such resistance works in the world — almost half of the roughly 1,000 pieces published during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands from 1940 to 1945. One of the Bancroft’s special collections, it was built by librarian James Spohrer.” –
Mark Twain at Play Online Exhibit
Mark Twain was a hardworking and prolific writer, but how did he spend his time when the “bread-and-butter element” was put aside and he was free to relax and amuse himself? This exhibition brings together manuscripts, documents, notebooks, albums, vintage photographs, and other artifacts from The Bancroft Library’s Mark Twain Papers. It was the inaugural exhibition (October 2008-April 2009) in the new exhibit space within the retrofitted and renovated Bancroft Library.
The Bancroft Library will be CLOSED for Spring Break
The Bancroft Library will be CLOSED between March 20th – 28th. Please plan your research accordingly.
Normal hours will resume on March 29th.
The Village Voice: Tebtunis and other communities in the Roman period
March 18th, The Bancroft Library Reading Room
5:30 pm
We would like to invite you to attend a public lecture by Alan Bowman, who holds the venerable Camden Chair of Ancient History at Oxford. Professor Bowman’s lecture will take place in The Bacroft Library’s Reading Room this Thursday, March 18th, at 5:30 pm; his topic is “The Village Voice: Tebtunis and Other Communities during the Roman Period.” If you’ve ever wanted to learn a bit more about the people that produced and used the papyri in the Bancroft collection, this is an excellent opportunity to do so.