Author: Lee Anne Titangos

Cal Day Events, April 20th

Posted on by Lee Anne Titangos

LECTURE:  “Sometimes a Picture Needs 1,000 Words: The History of the Bancroft Library Pictorial Collection”

11:00 am-12:00 pm
Barrows Hall, UC Berkeley

Led by Jack von Euw, Curator, Pictorial Collection

From its beginnings, The Bancroft Library Pictorial Collection served primarily to illustrate text. However the purchase of the Robert B. Honeyman Jr. Collection of Early Californian and Western American Pictorial Material in 1963 took it beyond the illustrative. This lecture is an overview of the collection from its beginnings to its present stature with approximately eight million items.

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TOUR:  The Magnes Collection

11:00 am-4:00 pm
2121 Allston Way, Berkeley

Led by Director Alla Efimova and Curator Francesco Spagnolo

Special tours will be offered every hour on the hour from 11 to 3. The collection is free and open to the public from 11 to 4. The two current exhibits are Through the Eyes of Rachel Marker: A Literary Installation by Moira Roth, and Sound Objects: Case Study No. 3.

 

Roundtable: The Mother Tongue in the Uttermost West

Posted on by Lee Anne Titangos

April 18th
Lewis Latimer Room, Faculty Club
12 PM

Led by Eli Rosenblatt, Ph.D. candidate in the UC Berkeley Jewish Studies Program and Curatorial Intern at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life

The final Bancroft Round Table of the 2013 Spring Semester will take place on April 18 at noon in the traditional Lewis-Latimer room of the Faculty Club.  This talk explores the collection of Yiddish-language printed materials published in California housed at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life. The collection includes a wide variety of novels, poetry collections, pamphlets, literary journals and rabbinic commentaries published by Eastern European Jews who settled on the California coast between 1881 and 1924. The modernist literature contained in the collection, and the Californian Yiddish literary circles it represents, helps us grasp the global dimensions of Yiddish literary movements. It offers a unique vantage point from which to discuss the circulation of Ashkenazi Jewish culture between its heartland in Slavic Europe and the Americas, Southern Africa, the Middle East and Western Europe.

The community is invited to join us to learn more about this little known aspect of Jewish and California history.  Bancroft Round Tables aim to highlight the myriad collections of our Library and showcase the ways in which they enrich our historical experience.

Roundtable: Southern and Californio Convergence in Southern California

Posted on by Lee Anne Titangos

The first Bancroft Round Table of the Spring 2013 Semester will take place on at noon, Thursday, February 21 in the Lewis-Latimer Room of the Faculty Club.  Daniel Lynch, Ph.D. candidate in the UCLA Department of History and Bancroft Library Gunther Barth Fellowship recipient will present ?Southern and Californio Convergence in Southern California: General Andrés Pico and the Chivalry Democrats, 1846-1861.?

Focusing on the life of the native-born Californio Andres Pico, this talk explores how two groups of southern Californians­Southerners and Californios­mediated the region’s incorporation into the United States during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. After leading Californio insurgents to their sole victory Mexican-American War at the Battle of San Pasqual, Pico launched a successful American political career as a state legislator. He joined the pro-slavery ?Chivalry? faction of the state Democratic Party to forge a powerful regional political alliance between Southerners and Californios. This unusual alliance shared goals of keeping taxes low, protecting land ownership, masculine honor and female virtue, and maintaining hierarchies of race, class and gender.

The way in which partisans of the losing sides of two successive wars, the Mexican and U.S. Civil, found common ground and came to form the nucleus of a southern California elite political alliance is both fascinating in itself and crucial for an understanding of California politics in the ensuing century and beyond.  The community is invited to join us at this talk.  The Bancroft Round Table series aims to highlight the vast resources of our library to enrich our understanding of our historical heritage.

Glorious Past, Glorious Future: Celebrating California Memorial Stadium

Posted on by Lee Anne Titangos

January 2 – July 31, 2013
The Bancroft Library Rowell Cases
Open during the operating hours of The Doe Library

This exhibition explores the earliest years of Cal’s football team and playing fields, the campaign to build the original Memorial Stadium, controversies surrounding it through the decades, interesting events beyond campus sports that happened there, the life of Coach Andy Smith, and unforgettable football-related moments and traditions, including the opening of the newly renovated and seismically retrofit stadium in September 2012. The title stems from one of the oft-quoted mottos in the original stadium’s promotional literature: “To Perpetuate California’s Glorious Past; To Build for Her Glorious Future.”

The cases feature an array of archival and manuscript material, including correspondence, photographs, football program illustrations, architectural drawings, scrapbooks, and brochures. Collections drawn from include the records of the Office of the President and the Office of the Chancellor; the Thomas Whitesides Collection of Football Programs; a scrapbook relating to the campaign to build the stadium; the Mary Rose Kaczorowski Collection of Save the Oaks Material; various pictorial collections, including the Roland Letts Oliver Photograph Collection, Views of California Memorial Stadium, and UC Berkeley Campus Events; and publications including the Blue and Gold.

Roundtable: It was a Bloody Mess: Vallejo’s 1942 race revolts and the Port Chicago strike

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November 15th
Lewis Latimer Room, Faculty Club
12 PM

Led by Javier Arbona, PhD candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography and Bancroft Study Award Recipient

The final Bancroft Round Table of  the Fall 2012 Semester will take place on Thursday, November 15th at noon in the Lewis-Latimer Room of  the Faculty Club.

This talk offers a history of a little-known chapter of the World War II home front, the 1942 “race riots” in Vallejo, California, and efforts to record these so-called riots in art and writing. This episode is significant because, among other reasons, it exposes some of the underlying conditions for the Port Chicago sailors’ strike at the same Vallejo barracks, and shows a larger pattern that set the stage for the 1944 mutiny trial against African American sailor-strikers under the same naval command.

The Port Chicago explosion is considered the worst home front disaster during World War II. On July 17, 1944, over 5,000 tons of munitions detonated while a ship was being loaded at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine, near Martinez. 320 enlisted personnel and civilian employees were instantly killed, and 390 were injured. Most of those who died were African American sailors loading bombs under segregation. The site is marked with U.S. National Park and Federal Memorial.

Learning about racial tensions that flared two years before this tragedy will help us grasp a context missing in popular understanding of the African American work stoppage that ensued after the explosion.

Bancroft Round Tables aim to highlight the myriad resources of The Bancroft Library in helping historical research. The community is welcome to join us at what promises to be an eye-opening presentation.

Class Acts and Co-op Alumni: Jack Rosston and Kenji Sayama

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October 18, 2012 – January 2013
The Bancroft Library Reading Room Exhibit Cases
Open during the operating hours of the Bancroft Reading Room

The University of California, Berkeley, Class of 1942 boasts at least two distinguished members with connections to The Bancroft Library. We shine the spotlight on John (Jack) Rosston and Dr. Kenji Sayama, as they celebrate their 70th reunion.

John (Jack) Rosston
To pay for transportation from his home in San Francisco to UC Berkeley during his freshman year, Jack Rosston held a number of jobs offered by the National Youth Administration, a New Deal agency. As a sophomore, he was able to move into Sheridan Hall, part of the UC cooperative system, where he stayed until 1942. (Sheridan closed in 1943, due to a shortage of men during World War II. The structure, now a fraternity house, still stands on the northwest corner of Piedmont Avenue and Dwight Way.) Even while working part-time, Rosston managed to participate heavily in campus activities. He spent two years each on the staff of the California Engineer, the Elections Board, and the Housing Board, to name a few. After graduating with a B.S. in agriculture, Rosston went on to attend the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

As a Cal alumnus, Rosston has continued to be just as active, if not more so. In 1980-1981, he served as an ex-officio member of the UC Board of Regents while president of the California Alumni Association. He is a major advocate of the UC Berkeley Library. Besides being a founder and past president of the Library Advisory Board, he has served a chair of The Bancroft Library Council of the Friends. He also conducted and donated an oral history interview that is now part of The Bancroft Library’s holdings. Not having forgotten his roots as a co-op member, Rosston remains involved with the Berkeley Student Cooperative Alumni Association.

Dr. Kenji Sayama
Kenji Sayama spent his childhood in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. After high school, he first enrolled at Los Angeles City College, but decided to transfer to UC Berkeley for his sophomore year. His Boy Scout troop leader was himself a Cal graduate, and having learned of Sayama’s interest in medicine, encouraged him to apply. Sayama made the trek up north and by junior year, had settled into Atherton House, a UC co-op house that was on Atherton Street. One of his roommates was William C. Rockwell, who was the first to play Oski, the Cal mascot. During his senior year in December 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred, followed by the US entrance into World War II. In February 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the military to relocate people of Japanese ancestry to internment camps. Although not yet identified for detention, Sayama decided to leave Cal and return home to Los Angeles in March 1942. He was just weeks shy of graduation, but fortunately was granted his diploma on the basis of his mid-term grades. He received it at the Santa Anita Assembly Center, where his family had been detained temporarily. The Sayama family would then be sent to the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas While there, Sayama taught eighth-grade science. He was able to leave the camp by enlisting in the US Army. He served four years in the 100th Infantry Battalion, 442nd Regimental Combat Team and Military Intelligence Service, receiving training in the US and interpreting for the police system in Japan.

After his discharge in 1947, Sayama enrolled once again at Cal, under the GI Bill. He earned a master’s degree in 1950, followed by a Ph.D. in zoology in 1953. In 1957, he was appointed chief laboratory technologist in a lab owned by the Downey, California-based Gallatin Medical Group, and worked there until 1996. He also established the Centro Analytical Medical Laboratory with another Cal alumnus in 1969 and was its director of laboratory operations until 1997. UC Berkeley held a special convocation in 1992 to honor the Nisei members of the class of 1942. Wearing cap and gown, Sayama received his diploma from classmate Jack Rosston. In November 2011, a major national honor was bestowed upon him, when he and dozens of other Japanese-American World War II veterans received Congressional Medals of Honor in Washington, DC, one of the country’s highest civilian honors. In early 2012, Sayama donated his medal and its accompanying documentation to The Bancroft Library, which also houses an oral history interview with him, conducted by N. H. (Dan) Cheatham.

Roundtable: What’s in the News? A look at the Fang Family SF Examiner photographic negative collection

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October 18th
Lewis Latimer Room, Faculty Club
12 PM

Led by Lori Hines, Bancroft Pictorial Processing Archivist

Six years ago The Bancroft received a gift of the San Francisco Examiner photographic archive.  Work is still ongoing in the effort to preserve, organize and make available (both digitally and in person) this rich archive of photographs documenting twentieth century San Francisco and more.  Pictorial Processing Archivist Lori Hines will present a slideshow and talk on trends in journalism, culture, and history she observed while sorting, re-housing, and describing the collection of 3.6 million negatives from ca. 1930-2000.  Please note: Some images shown might be shocking or considered offensive.

Bancroft, blessed with the photographic “morgues” of both the San Francisco News-Call Bulletin and the Examiner, offers a gold mine of images of Bay Area history.  The Examiner materials, samples of which can be found on a Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/SF.Examiner.Archive, are increasingly sought after by all manner of researchers. 

The entire community is welcome to join us and see some memorable images and hear Ms. Hines’s thoughtful observations.  Bancroft Round Tables aim to showcase the extensive and varied collections of our library.