Tag: Bancroft
Event: Bancroft Roundtable: “Before the PPIE: The Mechanics’ Institute and the Development of San Francisco’s ‘Fair Culture,’ 1857-1909.”
Please join us for the second Bancroft Library Roundtable of the fall semester!
It will take place in the Lewis-Latimer Room of The Faculty Club at noon on Thursday, October 15. Taryn Edwards, Librarian/Historian in the Mechanics’ Institute Library and Chess Room, San Francisco, will present “Before the PPIE: The Mechanics’ Institute and the Development of San Francisco’s ‘Fair Culture,’ 1857-1909.”
Between the years of 1857 and 1899, the Mechanics’ Institute hosted thirty-one industrial expositions that displayed and promoted the products of local entrepreneurs and inventors. These expositions bolstered California’s infant economy, encouraged the demand for local goods, and whetted the public’s appetite for elaborate, multi-attraction fairs. Given the Mechanics’ Institute’s vast experience with putting on such spectacles, its members were involved as consultants on larger state-wide fairs including the California Midwinter Fair of 1894, the Golden Jubilee Mining Fair of 1898, the Portola Festival of 1909, and the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915. Ms. Edwards will explore this rich history through a lecture and slideshow.
We hope to see you there.
Crystal Miles and Kathi Neal Bancroft Library Staff
Event: Bancroft Roundtable: “Whiskerology: The Meaning of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America.”
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
quick kills @ Bancroft blog
Lara Michels, an Archivist at the Bancroft Library, has a blog on tumblr that will update you on recent collections that have been processed.
As described on the blog, the “quick kills” project “is a three-year venture, funded by the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation, to increase access to legacy collections at the Bancroft Library. Building on a recent survey of the institution’s manuscript holdings, archivists Lara Michels and Mario H. Ramirez are swiftly processing approximately 160 high priority collections, opening them up to a new generation of researchers.”
Recent collections featured include:
– Stud Cards from the Cooper-Molera Family Papers
– the Paul Seabury papers
– records of Mission Neighborhood Centers, Inc.
– records of the Indian Defense Association of Central and Northern California
If you are not a tumblr user, another option is to subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed.
Event: Bancroft Roundtable: “‘The World’s Best Working Climate’: Modeling Industrial Suburbs on the Edge of San Francisco Bay.”
The last Bancroft Roundtable of the spring semester will take place in the Lewis-Latimer Room of The Faculty Club at noon on Thursday, May 21. Peter Ekman, Bancroft Library Study Award recipient and doctoral candidate in geography at UC Berkeley, will present “‘The World’s Best Working Climate’: Modeling Industrial Suburbs on the Edge of San Francisco Bay.”
Between 1880 and 1940, urban manufacturers, planners, and property developers configured a series of company towns and industrial suburbs just east of San Francisco Bay, stretching from Richmond to Antioch on the shores of the Carquinez Strait. Drawing on visual materials and numerous manuscript collections at the Bancroft, Peter Ekman will discuss how this unfashionable, ostensibly unplanned “middle landscape” came, over time, to serve as a kind of laboratory for new, imitable models of social and spatial order. He will place these experiments within a prehistory, intellectual and material-cultural, of the postwar suburb, and explore their afterlives amid decades of disinvestment.
We hope to see you there.
Crystal Miles, Kathi Neal, and Baiba Strads
Bancroft Library Staff
Event: Bancroft Roundtable: “Counter-institutions are the answer, man!” Multi-Ethnic Publishing in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s.
The next Bancroft Roundtable will take place in the Lewis-Latimer Room of The Faculty Club at noon on Thursday, March 19. Simon Abramowitsch, Bancroft Library Study Award recipient and doctoral candidate in English at UC Davis, will present “Counter-institutions are the answer, man!” Multi-Ethnic Publishing in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s.
In the 1970s, independent publishing in the San Francisco Bay Area was central to the development of multi-ethnic American literature. Writers, editors, and publishers of literary journals and small presses made space for literature by African American, Asian American, Latina/o, Native American writers as well as European American writing outside the mainstream. But more than simply efforts to present work by and for single ethnic groups, the development of multi-ethnic literature in the Bay Area suggested and argued for a properly multi-cultural American literature. Ishmael Reed and Al Young’s Yardbird is frequently cited as the exemplar of this movement for the multi-culture, but Yardbird was in fact only one instance of a diverse and complex range of regional efforts in this direction. The talk will discuss the history of this local literary activity by looking at some of the figures and publishing efforts in the Bay Area during the 1970s.
Kathi Neal and Baiba Strads Bancroft Library Staff
Event: Bancroft Roundtable: “Counter-institutions are the answer, man!” Multi-Ethnic Publishing in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s.
The next Bancroft Roundtable will take place in the Lewis-Latimer Room of The Faculty Club at noon on Thursday, March 19. Simon Abramowitsch, Bancroft Library Study Award recipient and doctoral candidate in English at UC Davis, will present “Counter-institutions are the answer, man!” Multi-Ethnic Publishing in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s.
In the 1970s, independent publishing in the San Francisco Bay Area was central to the development of multi-ethnic American literature. Writers, editors, and publishers of literary journals and small presses made space for literature by African American, Asian American, Latina/o, Native American writers as well as European American writing outside the mainstream. But more than simply efforts to present work by and for single ethnic groups, the development of multi-ethnic literature in the Bay Area suggested and argued for a properly multi-cultural American literature. Ishmael Reed and Al Young’s Yardbird is frequently cited as the exemplar of this movement for the multi-culture, but Yardbird was in fact only one instance of a diverse and complex range of regional efforts in this direction. The talk will discuss the history of this local literary activity by looking at some of the figures and publishing efforts in the Bay Area during the 1970s.
Kathi Neal and Baiba Strads Bancroft Library Staff
Event: Bancroft Round Table: The Campanile at 100
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
Event: Oral History Workshop
The Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library (formerly the Regional Oral History Office) is proud to launch a new 2-day oral history workshop that is designed for the person who is interested in learning the practice from ground-up. This workshop is conceived of as a companion initiative to the more in-depth Advanced Oral History Summer Institute, which typically attracts scholars and professionals with specific research projects in mind. The new Spring Workshop will focus on the “nuts-and-bolts” of oral history interviewing, including project planning, interviewing techniques, transcription, recording equipment, and preservation. The workshop will include instruction from our seasoned oral historians but also plenty of hands-on practice exercises. Although space is strictly limited, everyone is welcome to attend the workshop, including community-based historians, teachers, genealogists, public historians, and students in college or grad school.
The two-day workshop will be held on Friday March 13th and Saturday March 14th, 2015 on the UC Berkeley campus. The cost is $225, which includes a take-home oral history manual. Registration now open.
http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/education/workshop.html
Martin Meeker, Ph.D.
Associate Director
Event: Bancroft Round Table: Exposing the Hidden Collections of The Bancroft Library: A Report on the “Quick Kills” Project
Please join us for the November Bancroft Library Round Table!
It will take place, as usual, in the Lewis Latimer Room of The Faculty Club at 12:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 20. Lara Michels, archivist at the Bancroft Library, will present Exposing the Hidden Collections of The Bancroft Library: A Report on the “Quick Kills” Project.
Come hear Bancroft archivist Lara Michels report on almost three years of work on the “Quick Kills” manuscripts processing project at the Bancroft Library. Funded by the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation, the “Quick Kills” project has as its aim to increase access to the wonderful, but sometimes hidden, manuscript collections of the Library. Lara will share highlights, insights, and reflections on the process of opening up nearly 150 legacy manuscript collections to a new generation of researchers.
Hope to see you there.
Lara Michels and Baiba Strads Bancroft Library Staff
Exhibit: California: Captured on Canvas
California: Captured on Canvas represents a first for the Bancroft Library Gallery: it consists exclusively of paintings from The Bancroft Library Pictorial Collection. These paintings depict many aspects of California from the 1840s to the 1960s, including landscapes both vast and intimate, colorful urban scenes, and depictions of its inhabitants from the Californios of early Mexican California to a vibrant likeness of tennis great Helen Wills.
More than 40 paintings have been selected from the Library’s collection, including scenes of Yosemite, the Gold Rush, and turn-of-the-century Chinatown. Artists represented include William Keith and Thomas Hill along with more contemporary painters. A six by eight foot painting by Charles Grant, of “The Great White Fleet entering the Golden Gate in 1908,” is only one of the numerous and varied artistic interpretations of the Golden State on exhibit.
The gallery is open Mon-Fri, from 10am-4pm.