The Bancroft Library Open House

Come One, Come All!

March 26th, 2014
10am – 4pm

Come one, come all to the second Open House at The Bancroft Library. Explore the library collections and see magnificent displays of dynamic compendia. Discover our museum for a day through astonishing exhibits, amazing staff illumination, and riveting demonstrations with your friends and family.

Download the event program here.

For more information:
Call 510-642-3782
Email friends@library.berkeley.edu


Announcing the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study Digital Archive

The Bancroft Library is pleased to announce the publication of the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study Digital Archive: http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections/jais/

The result of a two-year digitization project generously funded by the National Park Service as part of the Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program, the digital archive makes available nearly 100,000 original manuscript items from The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study initiated in 1942 at the University of California, Berkeley. This research project sought to document the mass internment of Japanese Americans by embedding Nisei social science students recruited from the Berkeley campus into selected internment sites.

The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study Digital Archive website provides access to this massive collection of research materials through various means, including textual searches and browsing options, visual mechanisms such as GIS tagging and interactive maps, a timeline, and pointers to related resources. The collection comprises daily journals, field reports, life histories, extensive correspondence between staff, evacuees, and others, and secondary research materials collected and compiled by the research staff.


Winter Holiday Closure

The Bancroft Library Reading Room is CLOSED from December 21st to January 5th.

January Intersession Hours:
January 6th – January 17th
Monday – Friday, 1pm – 5pm

Normal hours of operation will resume on January 21st.  Please plan your research accordingly.


Thanksgiving Holiday Closure

The Bancroft Library Reading Room will be CLOSED Thursday, 11/28 and Friday, 11/29.

Normal hours of operation will be in effect on Wednesday, 11/27, and will resume on Monday, 12/3.

Please plan your research accordingly.


Water and Culture: Recovering Owens Valley Paiute History Exhibition

November 21, 2013 – May 19, 2014
Third Floor Foyer, The Bancroft Library
Open during the operating hours of The Bancroft Reading Room

Curated by Jenna Cavelle, Winner of the Judith Lee Stronach Baccalaureate Prize

A tribute to the memory of the Owens Valley Paiute Indian water achievements, losses, contributions to pioneer society, and expropriation by the city of Los Angeles. Featuring journals, maps, and photographs from the collections of The Bancroft Library, this exhibition highlights early historical records of the ancient irrigation systems of the Paiute Indian tribes of California and their place in Paiute traditional cultural landscapes.


Roundtable: Fallout Films: Bruce Conner’s Atomic Sublime, 1958 – 1976

November 21st
Lewis Latimer Room, Faculty Club
12:00 PM

Led by Johanna Gosse, a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art, Bryn Mawr College

San Francisco-based artist Bruce Conner made his first short film, A MOVIE, in 1958 at the height of the national anxiety about the atomic threat. Over the following two decades, Conner’s film-making practice was framed by the cultural and social fallout of the Cold War. Drawing on his papers at Bancroft, this talk will examine the films Conner produced during this period ? including masterful montages of “found footage,” psychedelic voyages into expanded consciousness, and intimate portraits of friends and collaborators. It will also analyze major influences on his distinctive apocalyptic vision of postwar America.


Roundtable: Thomas Kuchel: California’s Liberal Republican Senator

October 17th
Lewis Latimer Room, Faculty Club
12:00 PM

Led by Jason Bezis, a Boalt Hall graduate who is writing a biography of Senator Thomas Kuchel

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: advocating civil rights and defending his mentor Earl Warren against the John Birch Society and other reactionary forces; balancing California’s physical development with natural resources conservation; and 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.