California Studies BLOG

The California Institute for Federal Policy Research presents a one day conference April 30, 2009, titled “Managing Biosafety and Biodiversity in a Global World — EU, US, California and Comparative Perspectives”.  The conference, according to the Institute’s announcement, is:

the culmination of a two-year project examining the roles that California and the European Union play in defining the forefront of domestic and international environmental policy solutions. The goal of the project is to produce concrete, actionable policy recommendations to further regulatory cooperation between the EU, California and the US on transatlantic environmental issues, including climate change, chemicals policy, biosafety, water regulation, and biodiversity protection. As socioeconomic and environmental issues become increasingly integrated, innovative policy solutions are required to identify and address the complex nexus between society and environment. The project has developed a network of representatives from the US and the EU in academia, industry, the NGO-sector, and government.

The project is funded by the European Commission (DG External Relations) within the framework of the pilot-program on Transatlantic Methods for Handling Global Challenges. Event sponsors include:

• UC Berkeley IGS Center on Institutions and Governance (http://igov.berkeley.edu)
• Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
• University of California Washington Center

Thursday, April 30, 2009
9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
U.C. Washington Center
1608 Rhode Island Ave, NW, Washington DC
RSVP to UCDC to attend

To attend the conference, reply to Conference@UCDC.edu . For more information, visit http://igov.Berkeley.edu.

Peter Richardson has posted his thoughts on the CSA’s conference last Friday on Silicon Valley in his blog .  The conference was a one-day event that covered a lot of ground.  The location—De Anza College—in Cupertino was perfect.

The California Supreme Court Historical Society and the Los Angeles Times will present a colloquium on Monday, June 1, 2009 on “Civil and Uncivil Rights in California: The Early Legal History,” from 4 pm-7 pm at the LA Times’ Harry Chandler Auditorium. (The program starts at 4:30 pm and will be followed by light refreshments.)

Panelists will include Hon. Joseph Grodin, former Associate Justice of the Cal. Supreme Court, and a distinguished Professor of Law at UC Hastings, and Dr. Jean Pfaelzer, a professor at the University of Delaware and author of Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans. Jim Newton, editor of the LA Times Editorial Page, will moderate. Dr. Robert Chao Romero, a UCLA assistant professor in the Dept. of Chicano/a Studies, will provide additional remarks.

Admission is free for Historical Society members, and for students (with I.D.) and press; $15 for non-members; $10 for government / nonprofits. 2 hours of MCLE will be offered courtesy of Southwestern Law School.

For more information, and to register on-line, go to the California Supreme Court Historical Society’s website.

The Los Angeles Times and the New York Times also ran inciteful obituaries for Jim Houston.

The CSA notes the passing of a friend and colleague, James Houston. The following article appeared in the SF Chronicle on Friday, April 24.

In one of Mr. Houston’s most lauded novels, 2001’s “Snow Mountain Passage,” he wrote poignantly of the Donner Party’s famous deadly journey through the Sierra Nevada in the winter of 1846-47, focusing particularly on one family’s survival to become California pioneers.

So it was only fitting that when Mr. Houston knew cancer was about to claim him, he asked that his final hours be spent in his Santa Cruz home – a home that, years before, had been the place where Patty Reed Lewis, a member of that same Donner Party family he wrote about, spent her final hours as well.

“Jim had a really strong link to that place, and it was very special that he made it back there for his passing,” said Santa Cruz writer Geoffrey Dunn, a longtime friend. “He got to die there surrounded by family and friends.”

And, most fittingly, history.

Mr. Houston died April 16 at age 75.

For the past 40 years, he has been considered one of the foremost chroniclers – in both fiction and nonfiction – of the heartbeat and zeitgeist of America west of the Rockies, and its link to Hawaii and the rest of the Pacific Rim.

“Farewell to Manzanar,” the book he wrote with wife Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston in 1973, has become a staple of school reading lists. It chronicles Wakatsuki Houston’s wrenching time in the Manzanar Japanese American internment camp east of the Sierra during World War II. The book earned the couple the Humanitas Prize and opened people’s eyes to a view of the camps that they had not known before.

“Californians: Searching for the Golden State,” Mr. Houston’s account of traveling the state to understand it, and “Continental Drift,” his novel about a family living above the San Andreas Fault, helped portray the mind-set of California as few other works have. Similar insights came in his explorations of the Pacific Rim in the nonfiction “In the Ring of Fire” as well as his documentary films about Hawaii including, “The Hawaiian Way.”

Among Mr. Houston’s many commendations were two American Book Awards and an Emmy nomination for the film version of “Manzanar.”

Born and reared in San Francisco, Mr. Houston met his wife while earning a bachelor’s degree in dramatic arts at San Jose State in 1956 – an interest he continued to develop all his life as he played guitar in local folk and bluegrass bands. After serving three years in the U.S. Air Force, he earned a master’s degree in American literature at Stanford University, where he studied with Western writer Wallace Stegner.

As a teacher over the past 40 years at many campuses, including Stanford, UC Santa Cruz and San Jose State, Mr. Houston also helped nurture generations of writers. He brought the same nurturing approach to raising his children, in a very Western way.

“My dad taught me so many things that in retrospect I see prepared me to go out into the world and be independent,” said his daughter, Corinne Houston of Santa Cruz. “He showed me how to fix a flat, how to set a gopher trap in an organic garden … that’s the way he was. Very hands-on. He wanted me to be self-sufficient.”

In addition to his wife and daughter, Mr. Houston is survived by a son and another daughter, Joshua Houston of Honolulu and Gabrielle Houston Neville of Santa Cruz.

Services will be Saturday at 12:30 p.m. at Chaminade Resort, Santa Cruz, 1 Chaminade Lane, Santa Cruz. Memorial contributions can be sent to: Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, P.O. Box 1416, Nevada City, CA 95959.

E-mail Kevin Fagan at kfagan@sfchronicle.com.

Artist Tom Killion and poet Gary Snyder give a visual presentation and discuss Tamalpais Walking: Poetry, History, and Prints at Book Passage in Marin on April 28, at 7:00 p.m. The work explores Mt. Tamalpais’ natural, cultural, historic, and spiritual dimensions. “It is a book shaped by two master craftsmen collaborating on an enterprise nurtured by long and passionate involvement.” (from the Book Passage announcement).

Book Passage
51 Tamal Vista Blvd.
Corte Madera, CA 94925
Phone: (415) 927-0960

April 28, 2009, 7:00 pm

The Capitola Book Café will present the authors of The California Surf Project April 22, at 7:30 p.m.  From the book café’s listing:

Eric Soderquist is a professional surfer and artist who has participated as both in numerous contests, films and community events while traveling the world from Peru to Australia. Chris Burkard is a surf photographer who has worked for Surfer, Surfing, Transworld Surf, Surfline.com, Patagonia and Burton Snowboards; he is the winner of the Follow The Light Foundation grant (in memory of Larry Moore). Together they cajoled their Volkswagen bus along Highway 1 from the Oregon border to the Tijuana Sloughs. Their fully illustrated book is a love letter to the astounding California Coast and a testament to the passion for catching a perfect wave. This event includes a visual presentation.

CAPITOLA BOOK CAFE
1475 41st Avenue, Capitola, CA 95010
831-462-4415

The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West has scheduled an “In conversation” seminar April 23 with Louise Nelson Dyble, Ph.D., on her research about the Golden Gate Bridge.

From the announcement:

Landmark of Death: Purpose, Meaning, and Culture at the Golden Gate Bridge
Louise Nelson Dyble, Ph.D.

Suicides have been a persistent problem for the officials of the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District since the first disconsolate jumper plunged to his death in August 1937.  By 1940, the bridge’s macabre appeal had attracted national attention.  Seventy years later, the iconographic bridge retains its lure and fatalities are more frequent than ever.  It has been the site of more than 1,300 confirmed suicides, three times more than any other structure in history.  Dyble will discuss this phenomenon, drawing upon historical research and organizational theory to offer an answer to the question of why there is no suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge.

Louise Nelson Dyble is the Associate Director of Research of the Keston Institute for Public Finance and Infrastructure Policy at the University of Southern California.  Her book, Paying the Toll: Local Power, Regional Government and the Golden Gate Bridge, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in March 2009.

Thursday, April 23, 2009
12 noon to 1pm
Seaver classrooms, Huntington Library

This seminar is a part of a brown bag luncheon series sponsored by ICW.  The events are open to any who wish to attend, and a limited number of lunches will be available on a first come/first served basis.   To reserve a seat, please respond to Kim Matsunaga at kmatsuna@usc.edu at least one week prior to the seminar.

The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West will sponsor a conference April 25 at the Huntington Library entitled, “Where Minds and Matters Meet: Technology in California and the West.”  From the announcement:

ICW invites you to attend an All-Day Public Symposium:

Where Minds and Matters Meet: Technology in California and the West

April 25, 2009
Seaver Classroom #3
Munger Research Center
The Huntington Library
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino

PROGRAM

Coffee and Welcoming Remarks (8:30-9:00am)

I. Engineering Culture  (9:00-10:45am)
Bruce Sinclair (Lehigh University) “Engineering Hetch-Hetchy: Nature and Civil Engineers in early 20th Century California”

Amy Bix (Iowa State University) “Millikan’s Monastery: Caltech and the Tensions of Women’s Technical Minds.”

Patrick McCray (UC Santa Barbara) “Of Futures and Fringes: California’s Technological Enthusiasts, 1975-1985”

Peter Neushul (UC Santa Barbara) and Peter Westwick (ICW) “Aerospace and Surfing: Connecting Two California Keynotes.”

Comment: Janet Brodie (Claremont Graduate University)

II. How Technology Made Place (11-12:30pm)
Matthew Roth (University of Southern California) “The Public Relations of Urban Form: The Major Traffic Street Plan of 1924 and the Origins of Los Angeles Car Culture”

Louise Nelson Dyble (University of Southern California) “Landmarks of Death: Institutions, Technology, and Golden Gate Bridge Suicides”

Aristotle Tympas (University of Athens, Greece) “A Deep Tradition of Computing Technology: Calculating Electrification in the American West”

Comment: Sue Thomas (De Montfort University, Leicester UK)

Lunch (12:30-1:30pm)

Remarks: Volker Janssen (Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West) (1:30-1:45pm)

III. How Place Made Technology (1:45-3:30pm)
Carlene Stephens (Smithsonian ) “Time in Place: Is there a California Style in Aerospace Timekeeping Technologies?”

Stephanie Young (UC Berkeley) “Would Your Answers Spoil My Questions: Art and Technology at the Rand Corporation, 1968-1971″

Jason Weems (UC Riverside) “Sight Off Scale: Exponential Space and the Lure of the Limitless in Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten”

Martin Krieger (University of Southern California) “Placing Sound: Accurate Aural Documentation of L.A.“

Comment: Dan Lewis (Huntington Library)

IV. Transcending the West (3:45-5:15pm)
L. Chase Smith (UC San Diego) “Technologies of Leisure in San Diego’s Transpacific Borderlands”

Michaela Hampf (John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universitaet Berlin) “Beacons of Modernity: Western Lighthouses and Transatlantic Engineering of the 19th Century”

Linda Nash (University of Washington, Seattle) “From the Columbia Basin to the Helmand Valley: American Engineers, ‘Global’ Technoscience, and U.S. Imperialism since World War II”

Comment: Gail Cooper (Lehigh University)

Limited seating available. Please RSVP by April 17 with the symposium organizer: Volker Janssen (vjanssen@fullerton.edu)

Sponsored by: The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West / Additional Funding provided by The History Channel

The National Japanese American Historical Society will be hosting a book-signing with Kauko Nakane, author of Nothing Left in My Hands, a moving portrait of the lives of early Japanese immigrants in Pajaro Valley, California.

Saturday, May 2, 2009, 2 – 3:30pm
In the NJAHS Gallery, 1684 Post Street San Francisco, CA 94115 – (415) 921.5007
For more information, go to the NJAHS website.

The inaugural conference in the Hidden Stories Series of the California State Parks Association will take place May 4 at the Doheny Library at USC; the conference title is: “100 Years Since Allensworth: Is California Living up to the Legacy?”

The conference will commemorate the centennial of the founding of Allensworth, a town in Tulare County founded in 1908 for and by African Americans, with the idea that they could own property, learn, thrive, and live the American Dream.  The site of the town is now a the Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park.

The day will includes panels, lunch, and a post-conference reception in the new Visitors Center at the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook in Culver City.  The keynote speaker will be the Hon. Willie L. Brown, Jr.

The deadline for registration is April 28.  For more information, and to register, click here.

The next meeting of the Los Angeles History Research Group will take place on Saturday, May 16, 2009, in Classrooms 1 & 2 of the Munger Research Center at The Huntington Library.  As usual, the  meeting will take place at 10:00 a.m., with coffee available from 9:30.

Sarah Schrank, Associate Professor of History at CSU-Long Beach and author of Art and the City: Civic Imagination and Cultural Authority in Los Angeles, will speak about her recently published book at group’s final session of the year, which will commemorate accomplished scholar, beloved friend, and one of the group’s founding members, Clark Davis.

No paper will be circulated prior to the gathering.

If you have any questions, please contact one of the coordinators listed below.

Nick Rosenthal, ngrosen@lmu.edu

Allison Varzally, avarzally@exchange.fullerton.edu
(On leave)

Zócalo and the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West present a program April 29, 2009, at the Autry National Center, entitled: “Los Angeles vs. Las Vegas: Which is the Most Unreal City in America?”  From the announcement:

Los Angeles and Las Vegas are cities founded on fantasy—narratives of youthful glamour, the languor of palm and pool dotted landscapes, the ease of private automobile transport, the promise of self-invention and easy fame and power. They share city plans designed according to car culture. And they grow toward each other as they expand into the Mojave Desert. But reality has hit both cities: water grows scarce, space is tighter, cars clog roads and pollute the air, and money is disappearing. Zócalo hosts a panel of experts—including architect and University of Washington assistant professor Nicole Huber; writer, curator and former director of the Las Vegas Art Museum Libby Lumpkin; and educator, author and architect Ralph Stern—to discuss how the cities can continue to expand and to mirror each other even as they are forced to spar over dwindling resources.

The panel will be moderated by William L. Fox, Director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art.

The event is made possible, in part, by a grant from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation of Los Angeles.

Details:

Wednesday, April 29, 2009, 7:30 pm

Autry National Center
4700 Western Heritage Way
Los Angeles, CA 90027
Directions and parking
Go Metro

For more information, and to make reservations, click here.

I should be receiving page proofs soon for a piece that will run in California History. I was delighted to hear from editor Janet Fireman, who suggested I submit something from the Ramparts book, which is now in production. The essay is adapted from Chapter 3, “The Perilous Fight,” which covers the 1964-67 period. That’s when art director Dugald Stermer and Robert Scheer, who would eventually become editor-in-chief, signed on to the magazine.

Another boon: Shelly Kale, managing editor of California History, decided to feature the cover art from the July 1966 issue of Ramparts. It’s Edward Sorel’s “The Aviary [Hawkus Caucus Americanus],” which is really something. It looks like that will run on the cover of California History, too.  To see it, go to www.peterrichardson.blogspot.com.

Zocalo will host an event at the Hammer Museum this Tuesday to celebrate Los Angeles novelist and screenwriter John Fante’s 100th birthday. David Kipen will moderate a panel that includes Fante biographer Stephen Cooper. Fanatical readers of this blog will recall how highly I regard Steve and his work.

Fante was a close friend of Carey McWilliams, who claimed that he kept his companion “reasonably sober, away from the race tracks, draw poker sessions, opium dens and other low dives, properly confined to home and hearth and study and in regular attendance at mass.”

From the Book Passage calendar:

Rand Richards talks about Mud, Blood & Gold: San Francisco in 1849. Richards vividly brings to life what S.F. was like during the landmark year of 1849. Based on eyewitness accounts and previously overlooked official records, Richards chronicles the explosive growth of a wide-open town rife with violence, gambling, and prostitution, all of it fueled by unbridled greed.

Wed, Apr 08, 2009, 6:00 PM

Book Passage Bookstore
in the San Francisco Ferry Building
1 Ferry Building, #42
San Francisco, CA 94111
(415) 835-1020

Forwarded by Nari Rhee:

The Center for Latino Policy Research is happy to be a co-sponsor of this important interdisciplinary workshop that will take place Friday, April 3 and Saturday April 4 on the UC Santa Barbara campus. For additional information please click on the link below.

Vox California: Cultural Meanings of Linguistic Diversity
A UC Interdisciplinary Workshop

April 3-4, 2009
University of California, Santa Barbara
HSSB 6020

“Vox California” is an interdisciplinary workshop that seeks both to highlight language as a central component of California studies and to establish California as a crucial site for the investigation of language in social life. As the first conference to focus on the full scope of California’s linguistic resources, including but not limited to indigenous and immigrant languages, regional and ethnoracial dialects, subcultural linguistic styles, and linguistically mediated social activities, “Vox California” has a broad interdisciplinary mandate to examine how language semiotically shapes the sociocultural meaning of California and Californians locally, nationally, and globally. The workshop’s goal is not simply to document the state’s linguistic diversity but more importantly to investigate the cultural meanings of specific linguistic forms, representations, and practices, including social identities, political ideologies, and embodied cultural activities.

REGISTRATION IS FREE BUT ADVANCE REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED. To register, and for more information, see the Vox California website:

http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/VoxCA/

The Huntington Library will present a free lecture Weds., April 8, 2009, on Attorney and Judge Loren Miller.

From the Huntington’s calendar:

Attorney and Judge Loren Miller was also a civil rights activist who knew and worked with Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and author Langston Hughes. Amina Hassan, scholar and biographer of Loren Miller, will present a lecture on this prominent Los Angeles figure.

No reservations required. Friend’s Hall, Huntington Library.

The Zocalo at the Hammer series will present a program to commemorate the centennial of John Fante’s birth on April 7, 2009, at 7:00 p.m. at the Hammer Museum in Westwood.  From the Hammer’s announcement:

John Fante is a quintessential Los Angeles writer who penned the beautifully desperate words in Ask the Dust: “Los Angeles, give me some of you! …Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.” Los Angeles was his muse and inspired him to write some of the most influential prose about the American immigrant experience and the development of a young writer ever to reach print. A panel of Fante fans and scholars visit Zócalo to celebrate his work.

From Zocalo’s website:

Discovering John Fante is like tasting garlic for the first time. He is a quintessential Los Angeles writer, who penned the beautifully desperate words in Ask the Dust, “Los Angeles, give me some of you!…Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.” H.L. Mencken, John Steinbeck, Charles Bukowski, Robert Towne and Francis Ford Coppola number among the many fans who swear by Fante, who might have turned 100 this year if he hadn’t taken such lousy care of himself. (It’s a miracle he made it to 74.) Los Angeles was his muse, and inspired from him some of the most influential prose about the American immigrant experience and the development of a young writer ever to reach print. A panel of fans and scholars — including Fante biographer Stephen Cooper, KCRW’s Frances Anderton, and Esotouric co-founder Richard Schave – visit Zócalo to celebrate the work of John Fante.

The program will be moderated by David Kipen, Director of Literature, National Endowment for the Arts.

For more information, go to the Hammer Museum’s website, or to the Zocalo website.

The California Living New Deal Project has posted a second edition of the California New Deal Project News, on the project’s website.  The news includes notice of a New Deal Film Festival at the Pacific Film Archive, April 1-19, 2009.