Tag: Bancroft

Travis E. Ross, a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Utah, will present “Literary Industries: Hubert Howe Bancroft’s History Company and the Privatization of the Historical Profession on the Pacific Coast.” The event will take place in the Lewis-Latimer Room of The Faculty Club at noon on Thursday, November 19.

By the end of the nineteenth century, history writing was in the process of transitioning from a leisure activity for wealthy amateurs into a disciplined profession for a new class of academically trained historians whose research and publishing was underwritten by their university salaries. So the story goes. In the middle of that transitional period, between 1870 and 1890, the destination of professionalization remained uncertain. During that moment, a vertically integrated alternative to the modern historical profession dominated the Pacific Coast, eliciting surprising public support for a private monopoly over historical collecting, writing, and publication. This talk will reframe the professionalization of the historical enterprise by exploring the promise and the ultimate failure of the most (in)famous dead end along the road to our modern, academic profession.

Crystal Miles and Kathi Neal
Bancroft Library Staff

The first Bancroft Library Roundtable of the 2015-2016 academic year will take place in the Lewis-Latimer Room of The Faculty Club at noon on Thursday, September 17. Sarah Gold McBride, doctoral candidate in history at UC Berkeley, will present “Whiskerology: The Meaning of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America.”

In 1846, a New Orleans Picayune reporter proposed a new branch of natural science that, he argued, could provide scientists with reliable evidence of a person’s genuine identity. He called this new field “whiskerology,” the scientific study of facial hair. Though this idea may never have moved beyond the level of suggestion, the Picayune reporter represented a common belief among nineteenth-century Americans: that hair could expose the truth about the person from whose body it grew. Using evidence drawn from across American life—including scientific findings, legal practice, slavery, popular art, immigration debates, and agitation for women’s rights—this talk will explore how nineteenth-century Americans understood the meaning of hair. It was not just a means of creative self-expression, as it would come to function in the twentieth century. Instead, it was understood to be a trustworthy method to quickly classify a stranger—to know if someone was trustworthy, or courageous, or criminally inclined. Studying hair in historical context allows us to better understand how nineteenth-century Americans made sense of the increasingly modern society in which they lived.

Crystal Miles and Kathi Neal
Bancroft Library Staff

It will take place in the Lewis-Latimer Room of The Faculty Club at 12:00 p.m. on Thursday, February 19. Steven Finacom, who worked for 28 years as a career Berkeley campus staffer, primarily in physical planning but also in Undergraduate Affairs and community relations, will present “The Campanile at 100: Researching What We Thought We Knew.” Mr. Finacom’s work, and personal research interests, have taken him to the Bancroft reading room many times, particularly when researching the history of campus buildings. He is also past President of the Berkeley Historical Society and, for more than a decade, has written a weekly column about Berkeley history in the Berkeley Voice newspaper.

The focus of Mr. Finacom’s talk will be a work in progress on the history of iconic Sather Tower, Berkeley’s Campanile. The tower was largely completed in 1915, and 2015 will see a months-long centennial celebration. When Finacom and others began researching the history of the Campanile more than a year ago, it quickly became clear that many of the facts “everyone knows” about the tower are not necessarily true, or have ambiguous and complicated origins. How tall is the tower, really? Was the design really based on the Campanile San Marco in Venice? Did a BMOC (big man on campus) once catch a football dropped from the observation deck? The collections of the Bancroft and the UC Berkeley Newspapers and Microforms Library have proved invaluable in this continuing process of sleuthing out the actual, and intriguing, history of the Berkeley campus centerpiece.

We hope to see you there.

Kathi Neal and Baiba Strads
Bancroft Library Staff