Tag: Bancroft
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.
Event: Bancroft Round Table: Adolph Sutro as German-American Pioneer: Lifework and Impacts
Please join us for the first Bancroft Library Round Table of the Fall semester!
It will take place, as usual, in the Lewis Latimer Room of The Faculty Club at 12:00 p.m. on Thursday, September 18. Dr. Hermann-Victor Johnen, Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley’s Institute of European Studies, will present on Adolph Sutro as German-American Pioneer: Lifework and Impacts.
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Adolph Sutro was born in 1830 in Aachen, Germany and came to California during the Gold Rush. Later, in the Comstock Lode of Nevada, he constructed the Sutro Tunnel, which became the first mining tunnel in the United States. Sutro founded the Nevada town of Sutro and built the collections of the Sutro Library, one of the finest private libraries in the U.S. In San Francisco, he established the Sutro Baths, founded Sutro Forest, and in 1895 became mayor of San Francisco. Dr. Johnen will share the results of his ongoing interdisciplinary exploration of Adolph Sutro’s legacy up to the present day.
Hope to see you there. Lara Michels and Baiba Strads
Bancroft Library Staff
Event: Bancroft Round Table: Radiating Texts: The Properties of “Mark Twain,” 1862-1864
Please join us for the last Bancroft Library Round Table of the Spring semester!
It will take place, as usual, in the Lewis Latimer Room of The Faculty Club at 12:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 15. Garrett Morrison, Bancroft Library Study Award recipient and doctoral candidate in English at Northwestern University, will present Radiating Texts: The Properties of “Mark Twain,” 1862-1864.
Part of a larger project about print and place in the Gold Rush West, this talk focuses on the emergence of “Mark Twain” as a regional literary brand between 1862 and 1864. It situates Samuel Clemens’s work for the Virginia City Daily Territorial Enterprise in a place-based system of reprinting, and argues that many of his articles, especially the notorious hoax “A Bloody Massacre near Carson,” resisted the practice of free and anonymous recirculation. A presence, a persona asserted itself: an author named “Mark Twain.”
Lara Michels and Baiba Strads
Bancroft Library staff
Event: Bancroft Round Table: Gold on the Trees, Cold in the Ground: Cyanide and the Making of Southern California, 1886-1915
Please join us for the third Bancroft Round Table of the Spring semester. It will take place, as usual, in the Lewis Latimer Room of The Faculty Club at 12:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 17. Adam Romero, Bancroft Library Study Award recipient and doctoral candidate in Geography at UC Berkeley, will present Gold on the Trees, Gold in the Ground: Cyanide and the Making of Southern California, 1886-1915.
Cyanide fumigation, discovered in Los Angeles in the fall of 1886 by a USDA scientist and a handful of progressive LA growers, bought a temporary reprieve from the ravages of industrial pests, allowing grower-capitalists to turn the valleys of Southern California into a citrus empire. But synthetic cyanide did not arrive in Southern California as a pesticide. It was cyanide’s ability to separate gold from ore, eventually perfected by the MacArthur and the Forest Brothers in Scotland in 1887, that made it such a valued commodity in the mineral rich west. Using cyanide’s selective chemical thirst for metals, particularly gold, miners now could unlock the refractory gold bearing ores that remained once the thin layer of placer gold was scraped off in the mad dash gold rushes of the 1850s, 1860s, and early 1870s. The subsequent boom in industrial cyanide production in Scotland, Germany, and New Jersey to meet the mining demand in Southern Africa, Australia, and the US, was critical in making cyanide compounds available, both geographically and economically, for a rapidly industrializing citrus industry. Southern California’s highly standardized, uniformly beautiful, sun-kissed citrus, that came to be known across the world in the early 20th century, was only possible because of the pest control capabilities offered by the use of cyanide fumigation, and cyanide fumigation was only possible because of changes in industrial chemistry and the international gold mining industry.
Lara Michels and Baiba Strads
Bancroft Library Staff
Event: Bancroft Round Table: Hawaiian Pioneers in Mexican California
It will take place, as usual, in the Lewis Latimer Room of The Faculty Club at 12:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 20. Gregory Rosenthal, doctoral candidate in history at the State University of New York, Stony Brook and recipient of the Bancroft Library’s Arthur J. Quinn Memorial Fellowship, will present Hawaiian Pioneers in Mexican California.
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In his monumental History of California (1884-1890), Hubert Howe Bancroft included a “Pioneer Register” of the (mostly) Euro-American men who came to California in the years prior to the Gold Rush. In doing so, Rosenthal contends, Bancroft ignored the significant non-native, non-white populations that similarly “pioneered” the Mexican-to-American transition. For example, scores of Hawaiian men (and some women) arrived in Alta California in the first half of the nineteenth century to hunt sea otters, skin cattle hides, ferry cargo among ships, and otherwise occupy important niches in California’s trans-Pacific economy. At the Huntington Library, the California Historical Society, and at the Bancroft Library, Rosenthal has has mined the archives for traces of these lost “pioneers,” and what he has found is quite extraordinary. Some Hawaiian settlers owned land, others converted to Catholicism, while others intermarried with indigenous Californians. While most labored as wage workers for Euro-American employers, others toiled for and alongside Mexicans, African-Americans, and Indians. In this presentation, Rosenthal will tell some of their stories as well as put the history of these Hawaiian “pioneers” within the larger context of Hawaiian labor emigration in the nineteenth-century Pacific World. Hope to see you there.
Lara Michels and Baiba Strads
Bancroft Library Staff
Event: Bancroft Round Table on Thursday, February 20th
Please join us for the first Bancroft Round Table of the Spring semester!
It will take place, as usual, in the Lewis Latimer Room of The Faculty Club at 12:00 p.m. on Thursday, February 20. Emily Cole, doctoral candidate in Egyptology at UCLA and Bancroft Library Fellow working with the collections of the Center for the Teptunis Papyri, will present Reading Between the Lines: Translation in Ancient Egypt.
In her talk, Ms. Cole will present her current research on these remarkable multilingual texts which include older and newer phases of the Egyptian language. She will explore the nature of language transformation in Egypt in particular and how that relates to the way we communicate in general. She will also specifically talk about materials related to the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri, with which she has had the opportunity to work this year.
The traditional language of Ancient Egypt survived and was transformed over the course of nearly 4000 years. The texts of the Pyramid age in the Old Kingdom were copied through to the arrival of the Greeks and Romans at the turn of the common era. From the Middle Kingdom, scribes did not simply transcribe texts, but added commentary to them at the same time. However, although the texts were handed down, not all of the readers could understand the antiquated language. Just as Old English is no longer comprehensible to most modern English speakers today, Egyptians needed experts to read their sacred texts and, by the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE, commentary expanded to include some examples of full line by line translation.
Hope to see you there.
Lara Michels and Baiba Strads
Bancroft Library Staff
Event: Bancroft Round Table on Thursday, November 21st
The next Bancroft Round Table will take place in the Lewis Latimer Room of The Faculty Club at 12:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 21st. Johanna Gosse, PhD Candidate in History of Art at Bryn Mawr College will present “Fallout Films: Bruce Conner’s Atomic Sublime, 1958-1976.”
San Francisco-based artist Bruce Conner made his first short film, A MOVIE, in 1958, at the height of 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. Utilizing his papers at the 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–and will unpack the major influences on his distinctive apocalyptic vision of postwar America.
Hope to see you there.
Lara Michels and Baiba Strads
Bancroft Library Staff
Event: Bancroft Round Table on Thursday, October 17
Please join us for the second Bancroft Round Table of the 2013-2014 academic year in the Lewis Latimer Room of The Faculty Club at 12:00 p.m. on Thursday, October 17.
Jason Bezis, a Boalt Hall graduate who is currently working on a biography of Thomas Kuchel, will present “Thomas Kuchel: California’s Liberal Republican Senator.”
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: (1) advocating civil rights and defending his mentor Earl Warren against the John Birch Society and other reactionary forces, (2) balancing California’s physical development with natural resources conservation, and (3) 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.
You can also plan ahead to attend the final Bancroft Round Table of the fall semester, which will take place on Thursday, November 21st. It will feature Johanna Gosse (Bryn Mawr College PhD candidate in the History of Art) presenting a talk entitled “Fallout Films: Bruce Conner’s Atomic Sublime, 1958-1976.”
Lara Michels and Baiba Strads
Bancroft Library Staff