Rick Prelinger: Lost Landscapes of San Francisco 4, Fri. Dec 4

Rick Prelinger: Lost Landscapes of San Francisco 4 – The Long Now.

Rick Prelinger, a guerrilla archivist who collects the uncollected and makes it accessible, presents the fourth of his annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco screenings. You’ll see an eclectic montage of rediscovered and rarely-seen film clips showing life, landscapes, labor and leisure in a vanished San Francisco as captured by amateurs, newsreel cameramen and industrial filmmakers.

How we remember and record the past reveals much about how we address the future. Prelinger will preface the screening with a brief talk on how historical memory is shifting away from mass culture towards individual expression, and what consequences will arise from the emerging massive matrix of personal records.

Join us for a reception with no-host bar following the Seminar in the main Lobby of the Herbst Theater.

Doors open 7 pm, Talk begins 7:30pm lasting ~1.5 hours

Herbst Theatre on Van Ness Ave. San Francisco, California

 

Next Autry Western History Workshop – Nov. 10 – On Lewis & clark

The next meeting of the Autry Western History Workshop will take place on Tuesday, November 10.  The presenter will be Elliott West from the University of Arkansas; his paper is entitled “Why It Matters That Lewis and Clark Didn’t Get Sick (Or At Least Really Sick),” and available to read ahead of time from the Autry.

As usual, the workshop will meet in the classroom at the Autry’s Griffith Park campus.  The seminar will begin at 7PM, with dinner at 6:30 to those who reserve a place by Thursday, November 5.  Reservations are required for dinner for this session.  To reserve, please contact Belinda Nakasato-Suarez at bnakasato@autrynationalcenter.org.

 

Saving The Bay | KQED Documentary Series Begins Thur Oct. 8

Saving The Bay | KQED Public Media for Northern CA.

Narrated by Robert Redford, this lively and timely series is about one of America’s greatest natural resources – San Francisco Bay. Shot in high definition, it consists of four episodes focusing on the geological, cultural, and developmental history of San Francisco Bay and the larger northern California watershed, from the Sierra Nevada mountains to the Farallon Islands in the Pacific Ocean.
From the Gold Rush to the Golden Gate Bridge, and through World’s Fairs and World Wars, San Francisco Bay has been central to the identity of one of the world’s leading economic, academic, recreational, and cultural regions. This series explores its evolution, how we almost lost and then saved the Bay, and how we are planning for the future, including wetland restoration, increased public access, and balancing the often competing needs of a fragile ecosystem that is the centerpiece of a major urban area.

Upcoming Broadcasts:

Marvel of Nature (Prehistory – 1848) (#101) Duration: 56:31 CC Stereo TVG

In the first episode, photo-realistic animation illustrates the formation of the Bay following the last Ice Age. It introduces the first inhabitants along the Bay’s shores, including Native Peoples along with flora and fauna, and continues through European exploration and settlement, including Spanish, Russian and ultimately, American influences that dramatically altered the region.

Harbor of Harbors (1849 – 1906) (#102) Duration: 56:42 CC Stereo TVG

This episode follows San Francisco’s “rapid monstrous maturity” into a major metropolis following the California Gold Rush. Establishing the infrastructure to support the instant city meant radical change for San Francisco Bay. By the century’s end, San Francisco Bay was the center of a broad economic empire on the Pacific.

Miracle Workers (1906 – 1959) (#103) Duration: 56:58 CC Stereo TVG

This episode begins with The Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906, which accelerated the dispersion of people and industry to the East Bay region. Advances in engineering gave rise to the first of California’s massive water re-distribution projects, paralleling the era of great bridge building. World War II saw the Bay transformed into the greatest shipbuilding center the world had ever known.

Bay in the Balance (#104) Duration: 56:46 CC Stereo TVG

In the final episode, the very survival of the Bay is threatened by the postwar boom. Viewers are introduced to the leaders of the Save the Bay campaign of the 1960s and the birth of the national mass environmental movement. As the Bay Area looks to the future, the issue becomes how best to balance the competing demands of a major urban center set amidst an environmentally significant landscape.

 

Opens at the Huntington Oct. 24: Central Avenue and Beyond: The Harlem Renaissance in Los Angeles

A new exhibition focusing on the extraordinary artistic, cultural, and intellectual expressions and accomplishments of African Americans in Los Angeles will open at the Huntington Oct. 24, 2009.  Titled, “Central Avenue and Beyond: The Harlem Renaissance in Los Angeles,” the exhibition will include material from both The Huntington and the Mayme A. Clayton Library, a new cultural and education institution founded by Avery Clayton to house and make available his mother’s extraordinary collection of African Americana gathered during her 40-year career as a librarian in Los Angeles.  The show will continue until Jan. 4, 2010.

For more information, click here.

 

Autry Western History Workshop returns Tuesday, October 13

The Autry Western History Workshop returns for another year on Tuesday, October 13.  The presenter will be James Snead from George Mason University, and he will present his paper, “‘That indefinable Exhilaration’: Economy, Ambition, and Relic Hunting in the Territorial Southwest.”

The workshop will begins at 7PM, with dinner available at 6:30 for those who reserve a place by Friday, October 9.  To make a reservation, or to obtain a copy of Prof. Snead’s paper, email Belinda Nakasato-Suarez at bnakasato@autrynationalcenter.org.

 

USC’s Archives Bazaar resurrects L.A.’s history — latimes.com

USC’s Archives Bazaar resurrects L.A.’s history — latimes.com.

They gathered outside a nightclub called the Black Cat one winter night in 1967, perhaps a few hundred men and women in all, joined together in a moment of happy subversion on a Silver Lake street. Weeks earlier, police had swept through the club and arrested 14 people after witnessing, at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, the “crime” of one man kissing another.

It’s unlikely any of the protesters had been to an organized gay-rights demonstration — the movement in Los Angeles was then in its infancy. Someone brought a camera and snapped a few pictures. Finally the demonstrators dispersed. They put away or threw away the signs they had made.

There are precious few known artifacts remaining from the Black Cat protest, an event that preceded by more than two years the famous Stonewall “riots” in New York. People who make history are often unaware they are doing so. They don’t always preserve the objects and documents that could make those momentous events come alive for future generations.

That’s where a small but dedicated band of Los Angeles archivists comes in. They rescue the things that make up our collective history: a Remington typewriter owned by the Depression-era pioneer of Spanish-language radio, posters and sheet music from the jazz glory days of Central Avenue, the photographs taken outside the Black Cat on the night of Feb. 11, 1967.

On Oct. 17, the people who collect and catalog these artifacts of modern Los Angeles will gather for a kind of open house, the fourth annual Los Angeles Archives Bazaar at USC’s Davidson Conference Center.

“It’s a first attempt at building history,” Chon Noriega told me, describing his work as director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, one of the 70 institutions contributing exhibits to the Archives Bazaar. “Three hundred years from now when somebody comes to this university and wants to write about what happened in Los Angeles, there will be something for them to see.”

Los Angeles is among the youngest of the world’s great cities. Rome has a couple of millenniums of history; New York, four centuries. As late as 1880, Los Angeles was still a little country burg of 11,000 people. In a dozen decades it became a diverse metropolis, home to utopian dreamers and ambitious capitalists, to groundbreaking artists and refugees from poverty and discrimination.

Our city might look beat up and tired these days. But we still enjoy many of the fruits of the glorious, good fights of the 20th century, when L.A. became a cosmopolitan crossroads with an ample middle class. In the last decades of that century, people lived more freely here than almost anywhere else.

The raw material of that remarkable narrative is gathered in places such as the Culver City Historical Society, the Autry National Center for the American West, the Chinese American Museum and the Mayme Clayton Library and Museum, an archive built by a local librarian with a passion for black history.

All those institutions will be represented at the Archives Bazaar.

I’m writing these words today as a kind of thank-you note to the professionals and amateurs who’ve built those archives. Over the years, I’ve spent many hours perusing their collections. I’ve learned that there’s a certain power and knowledge that comes from spending time with history in its rawest, most unprocessed form.

Michael Palmer of the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives knows that power too. A few years back, he found the photographs of the Black Cat protest in a box of materials donated to the archives. He doesn’t even know who shot the images. For historians of gay culture in Los Angeles, it was like finding a Holy Grail. And it left Palmer and fellow archivist Loni Shibuyama hungry for more.

So if you know someone who was at the protest and might have materials related to the police raid that New Year’s Eve and the demonstrations that followed (an arrest report, maybe, or some personal correspondence), please give the ONE archives a call.

“Basically, we’d get them in a room and beg and plead until they gave us the originals,” Palmer said. In exchange, the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives would offer the closest thing on Earth to immortality. They would promise to protect those precious documents and objects so that they could live on for centuries.

Noriega at UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center can also promise the controlled humidity and temperature and careful handling of a professional archive. The center’s collections are stored, along with many others, in a vast facility underneath the UCLA campus. “They’re safe,” Noriega said of the materials. And they’re all available to researchers.

Noriega spends a lot of time thinking about how the present will look to the future. “You ask yourself, ‘What is going to be useful to historians trying to reconstruct this period?’ “

The 20th century saw a boom in Latino arts in L.A., so Noriega has reached out to artists like Judy Baca, who has donated papers, along with the painter and performance artist Gronk. “He gave us all of his papers, notebooks, diaries, sketchbooks, even napkins he’s drawn on,” Noriega said.

I thought I knew a lot about the history of Latino Los Angeles. But I’d never heard about two other men who donated their papers and mementos to the UCLA center.

Pedro Gonzalez was a one-time soldier in Pancho Villa’s army who later migrated to California, where he started the first Spanish-language radio program in Los Angeles. In the 1930s, he broadcast denunciations of the immigration raids on Latino neighborhoods, and he was later arrested and deported. His typewriter survived his years of exile and is now in the center’s possession.

Dionicio Morales organized protests against segregation

in Southern California theaters. His struggle began the night in 1940 when he was told to sit in “the Mexican section” of a Moorpark movie house during the opening night of “Gone With the Wind.” He refused.

“I was hustled out of the theater and my 25 cents was refunded,” Morales wrote. Later he organized a successful campaign to force an end to the practice of segregating seating.

Of course, the histories of protest, art and ambition are still being written in Los Angeles. People are marching, imagining and striving here as much as ever.

If you’re one of them, you might want to think twice before throwing out those old letters and pamphlets — and consider instead putting the items in safe hands. In the distant future, a lover of early 21st century Los Angeles history may thank you for it.

hector.tobar@latimes.com

 

California Historian, Louise Nelson Dyble, on the Golden Gate Bridge and TJ Kent: Oct 14th in Berkeley; Oct. 16 in Oakland

Past CSA President, Louise Nelson Dyble will be appearing at University Press Books in Berkeley to present on her recent book, Paying the Toll: Local Power, Regional Politics, and the Golden Gate Bridge. She will also be presenting on seminal UC Berkeley and City of Berkeley planner, TJ Kent, at the Planning History Conference that weekend. See the University Press Books event here. See the SACRPH, Planning History Conference, program here.

The announcement from University Press Books:

Louise Nelson Dyble, author of

Paying the Toll: Local Power, Regional Politics, and the Golden Gate Bridge

Wednesday, October 14, 2009, 5:30-7:00

The impact of the Golden Gate Bridge on the San Francisco Bay Area has been much more than visual—toll revenue has allowed the small group of appointees in charge of the structure to build a minor political empire, shaping the regional landscape and economy in the process.  Even though the agency responsible for the bridge was extremely unpopular and its officials were notorious for crooked dealings and mismanagement by the 1960s, they were able to defend its autonomy by actively opposing oversight, fighting investigations, and spurning reform.  Ultimately, they insured its survival beyond the retirement of construction bonds by expanding operations to include mass transportation—a guaranteed money-loser and perpetual reason to collect tolls. Paying the Toll traces the development and the influence of the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District from its creation in the 1920s through its metamorphosis into a regional transportation authority in the 1970s.  Drawing upon previously unavailable sources, it provides an inside view of the high-stakes bureaucratic power politics carried out in the shadow of the bridge.

Louise Nelson Dyble is Assistant Professor of History at Michigan Technological University.

 

Society for American City and Regional Planning History, Oakland Conference Oct. 15-18

To All Urban Historians, Planners, Activists, and Academics in the Bay Area and Beyond:

The conference organizers are very pleased to announce the upcoming 13th National Conference on Planning History, taking place in Oakland, California October 15-18, 2009.  The event is sponsored by the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH).  The preliminary program and conference registration forms, as well as travel and hotel information, are available on the conference website: http://www.barnard.edu/urban/sacrph09.  Interest in the meeting has been remarkable, with the number of paper and panel proposals up 20-25% over all previous SACRPH meetings.

The conference location, the Oakland Marriott City Center, is accessible by BART (Oakland City Center / 12th Street Station) and is convenient to the 880 and 980 Freeways.

Local Highlights: While the conference is international in scope, a number of events focus on the Bay Area itself. These include:
- A Thursday pre-conference tour entitled “Democracy on the Ground in West Oakland: Immigrants, Migrants, and the Development of an African-American Community”;
- A Thursday night address by Richard Walker of the University of California on “West Oakland and the Bay Area Region”;
-  A Friday morning plenary roundtable on regional equity, focusing on the East Bay;
- A Friday lunch plenary featuring pioneering urban planners of the Bay Area;
- Sunday morning tours of Oakland, San Francisco, Berkeley, and Marin;
- Papers and sessions throughout the conference on local and regional topics such as urban renewal in San Francisco; Chinatowns in San Francisco and Oakland; gay neighborhoods and the geography of sexuality in San Francisco; the 1906 earthquake and its aftermath; race and housing in Fremont and Richmond; and many, many more.

SCHEDULE:

All paper sessions will take place between 8:30 am on Friday, October 16, and 6:30 pm on Saturday, October 17.  The conference schedule and full registration includes receptions Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings, breakfast Friday and Saturday, and lunch Friday and Saturday.  In addition to the paper sessions and round tables, we’d like to draw your attention to two New Media sessions, an undergraduate and Master’s student poster session, a proposal-writing workshop and reception for graduate students, and the screening of a documentary film-in-progress allowing participants to provide feedback to the director.  The book exhibit, open on Friday and Saturday, has a record number of participating presses.

The Thursday and Sunday events (Thursday’s Oakland symposium, and the Sunday tours) require separate registration, as explained in more detail on the website.  The Thursday tour of West Oakland promises a fascinating look at the multifaceted history of a neighborhood.  The four Sunday tours will take advantage of the rich variety of the Bay Area:  Historical Development and Ethnic Change in Oakland; Berkeley Architectural Tour; Urban Renewal in San Francisco; and finally, North of the Golden Gate: Growth Control, Open Space, and Alternative Agriculture on the Urban Fringe.

AICP CREDITS

We have worked closely with the Northern California chapter of the American Planning Association to ensure that the conference will bring together scholars and practitioners.  AICP members can earn Certificate Maintenance (CM) credits for many activities at the SACRPH Conference. More information about AICP’s CM program can be found at www.planning.org/cm.

CONTACT

Questions about the conference?  Please e-mail SACRPH@history.rutgers.edu.

CALL FOR STUDENT VOLUNTEERS

Student volunteers are needed both before the conference (to help with local arrangements) and during the conference (to staff the registration desk and provide AV support).  Each three-hour shift will qualify a volunteer for one free day of conference registration.  This is a great opportunity to meet with the leading scholars and practitioners in the fields of urban planning, urban history, architectural and landscape planning and history, urban design and preservation.  Please contact Stephanie Dyer at stephanie.dyer@sonoma.edu or Asha Weinstein Agrawal at asha.weinstein.agrawal@sjsu.edu for details.

We look forward to seeing you in Oakland.

With best wishes,

Robin F. Bachin, SACRPH President
Alison Isenberg, SACRPH President-Elect and Program Committee Co-Chair
Owen Gutfreund, Program Committee Co-Chair
Jim Buckley, Local Arrangements Co-Chair
Gail Sansbury, Local Arrangements Co-Chair
Stephanie Dyer, Local Arrangements Co-Chair

More on SACRPH: SACRPH is an interdisciplinary organization dedicated to promoting scholarship on the history of planning cities and metropolitan regions.  Its members come from a range of professions and areas of interest, and include architects, planners, historians, environmentalists, landscape designers, public policy makers, preservationists, community organizers, students and scholars from across the country and around the world.  SACRPH publishes a quarterly journal, The Journal of Planning History (http://jph.sagepub.com/), hosts this biennial conference, and sponsors awards for research and publication in the field of planning history.  For further information please consult http://www.dcp.ufl.edu/sacrph.

 

Author event at Book Passage in Marin; Peter Richardson on Ramparts Magazine; Sept. 25

Peter Richardson (Chair of the California Studies Association) will talk about his new book, A Bomb In Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America. From the Book Passage listing:

This is the rollicking story of Ramparts—the San Francisco magazine that captured the zeitgeist of the 1960s, repeatedly scooping the N.Y. Times. Ramparts brought the new left into American living rooms, and it made an indelible imprint on American journalism.

Fri., Sept. 25, 7:00 pm

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

 

Author event at Book Passage in Marin; Mike Miller talks about the Mission Coalition; Sept. 24

Mike Miller will talk about his new book, A Community Organizer’s Tale: People and Power in San Francisco. From the Book Passage listing:

This is the story of a Bay Area neighborhood and its long-term citizens. The Mission Coalition was a group of citizens who fought to keep the community intact in San Francisco’s predominantly Latino Mission District.

Thurs., Sept. 24, 7:00 pm

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

 

Author event at Book Passage in San Francisco: John Buntin on the LAPD; Sept. 24

John Buntin will talk about his new book, L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City at Book Passage in San Francisco on Sept. 24.  From the Book Passage listing:

Buntin offers a fascinating examination of how the LAPD created a  dangerously unaccountable surveillance-intensive model of crime fighting that damaged Los Angeles’s social fabric and eerily prefigured today’s “war on terror.”

Thurs., Sept. 24, 6:00 pm, Book Passage, 1 Ferry Building, #42, San Francisco, CA 94111, Phone: (415) 835-1020

 

Peter Richardson to speak about Ramparts Magazine at the Institute on California and the West

The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West will be presenting a conversation with Peter Richardson (current Chair of the California Studies Association), to discuss his new book, A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America.  The conversation will be led by David Igler, of UC Irvine.

Peter Richardson teaches California Culture at San Francisco State University, chairs the California Studies Association, and is editorial director at PoliPointPress, which publishes trade books on politics and current affairs.  Richardson wrote American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams.

Details: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2009 from noon to 1:00pm
Seaver Classrooms 1&2, Huntington Library

This event is part of a brown bag luncheon series sponsored by ICW.  The event is open to any who wishes 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 by October 1.

 

Calif. Historical Society’s Think California Exhibition Opens September 24, 2009

“Think California,” the California Historical Society’s new exhibition will offer a glimpse into California’s complex past and present through the society’s remarkable collection.

The exhibition opens September 24, 2009, and will continue until February 5, 2011.

For more information, go the society’s webpage for the exhibition.

California Historical Society
678 Mission Street
San Francisco

 

Call for Papers: Western Association of Women Historians: May 20-23

CALL FOR PAPERS

Western Association of Women Historians
42nd Annual Conference

University of Puget Sound
Tacoma, Washington

May 20-23, 2010

* *

The WAWH invites faculty members, graduate students, independent
scholars and others for a collegial, stimulating, and professional
weekend of history and networking.

The program committee welcomes proposals for panels or single papers on
any historical subject, time period, or region. The program
committee seeks to emphasize that papers do not necessarily have to
focus on women’s or gender history, although those issues are of
interest to the membership. All periods of history are welcome,
especially non-U.S. subjects. Panels, workshops, or roundtables on
issues in the historical profession are also encouraged. Proposals for
complete panels, including commentators, are preferred, but individual
papers are also welcome.

WAWH offers a prize for the best paper presented by a graduate student
at the WAWH meeting. Please see www.wawh.org for guidelines.

Proposals must include each of the following:

1) A required WAWH Cover Page (found at www.wawh.org)

2) A one-half to one-page abstract for each paper submitted

3) One-to-two-page curriculum vitae for each panelist

Mail _six_ complete sets of proposal material to the program committee
co-chair, postmarked by October 15, 2009:

Dr. Nancy Page Fernandez
Freshman Programs
California State University, Fullerton
Langsdorf Hall Suite #216
800 North State College Blvd.
Fullerton, CA 92831-3599

If you have any questions, please contact either program co-chair:

Kathleen Kennedy at Kathleen.Kennedy@wwu.edu or 360-650-3043 or

Nancy Page Fernandez at npfernandez@fullerton.edu or 657-278-4184

Current (2009-2010) WAWH membership and 2010 conference preregistration
are _required_ of all program participants.

WAWH Membership runs from conference to conference.

The program committee reserves the right to change or reconfigure
panels. Submission of proposal will indicate agreement with this policy.
Communication with panelists will be made through the designated contact.

Electronic submissions will not be accepted.

The Western Association of Women Historians was founded in 1969. Drawing
scholars from the Western states, the WAWH is the largest of the
regional women’s historical associations in the United States.
Membership is open to all. For information about the organization, award
and prize applications, proposal deadline, conference registration,
conference program, and membership, please visit www.wawh.org.

 

Los Angeles History Research Group’s first meeting of 2009-10 is Sept. 19

The first meeting of the Los Angeles History Research Group for 2009-2010 will take place at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, September 19, 2009, in Classroom 3 of the Munger Research Center at The Huntington Library.

The presenter will be Sara Fingal, PhD candidate, Brown University, who will discuss her paper, “Turning the Tide: Conflict, Leisure, and Access along Southern and Baja California’s Coastline, 1940s-1980s.”  To request a copy of the paper, please contact Carolyn Powell at cpowell@huntington.org.

Anyone with questions may contact one of the coordinators listed below, who can also provide a complete schedule for the year.

Nick Rosenthal, ngrosen@lmu.edu

Allison Varzally, avarzally@exchange.fullerton.edu

 

BOOK TOUR: Peter Richardson Speaks at the CSA Dinner Series, and Across California on Ramparts Magazine

Please come help us celebrate the release of California studies scholar and CSA chair, Peter Richardson. You can read more about his work at his blog here. Please also find information on Richardson’s book tour below and at his blog.

Peter Richardson, Author

Mr. Richardson will speak on his new book on Ramparts Magazine and the culture and politics of the 60s

7 :00 p.m. – 10 :00 p.m.

Director’s Room, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, 2521 Channing St.(just above Telegraph Ave).

The dinner is buffet style. Dinners are free, but we ask for a small donation for those partaking of wine and beverages.

PLEASE RSVP by Friday, September 11, 2009 to Delores Dillard, Department of Geography, 507 McCone Hall, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA  94720-4740

phone (510)  642-3903 or FAX (510) 642-3370, or e-mail:  deloresd@berkeley.edu

The Seminar is a project of the California Studies Center  at UC Berkeley (part of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment) and is supported by the California Studies Association, Department of Geography and Townsend Center for the Humanities.

To see the full  schedule go to:  http://geography.berkeley.edu/LecturesEvents/CalDinners/CalDinners.html

BOOK TOUR DATES:
The Ramparts book campaign is getting traction. I just heard Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone field a question from “CounterSpin” host Peter Hart, who referred to the history of Ramparts he was reading. Call me a reckless speculator, but I think that book might be A Bomb in Every Issue.

Related articles and coverage are starting to appear, too. A long excerpt appeared in California History, the sharp-looking journal of the California Historical Society. Truthdig posted a piece adapted from Chapter 5. Hunter S. Thompson Books also posted a short piece on HST’s links to Ramparts and a Q&A with me. And the stylish California magazine will run a essay on Ramparts and Berkeley in the September issue.

We’re expecting reviews and coverage in Slate, In These Times, Beyond Chron, and FrontPage. I’ve also been contacted by Andy Ross and Frances Dinkelspiel, who blog about books and publishing.

We’re booking radio and such now. In addition to the programs below, look for interviews with Gustavo Arellano (KPFK), Norm Stockwell (WORT in Madison), and Bob McChesney (WILL AM 580 in Illinois). It looks like there will also be an event at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism in late October.

So here’s what’s confirmed on the calendar so far.

Bay Area:

Sept. 16, California Studies Dinner Seminar, Berkeley

Sept. 21, Peninsula Peace and Justice Center with Steve Keating, First Presbyterian Church, Palo Alto, noon and 7:30 p.m.

Sept. 23, City Lights book party with Warren Hinckle, Larry Bensky, and Reese Erlich, Vesuvio Cafe, San Francisco, 7 p.m.

Sept. 24, Berkeley Arts & Letters with Robert Scheer, introduction by Susan Griffin, First Congregational Church, 7:30 p.m.

Sept. 25, Book Passage with Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich, Corte Madera, 7 p.m.

Sept. 29, Capitola Book Cafe, 7:30 p.m.

Los Angeles:

Oct. 5, Book Soup, Sunset Strip

Oct. 6, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, Huntington Library, San Marino.

Oct. 6, USC with Robert Scheer’s class

Oct. 7, USC with Robert Scheer’s class

Oct. 9, Village Books with Derek Shearer, Pacific Palisades, 7:30 p.m.

Media appearances:

July 29, “Politics with Norman Solomon,” KWMR 90.5 FM

Aug. 19, “This Is America” with Jon Elliott, San Diego 1700 AM, 4:30 p.m.

Aug. 23, “Sunday Sedition,” KPFA, 94.1, 9-11 a.m.

Sept. 15, “America Offline,” KWMR, 90.5 FM, 5:30-6:30.

Sept. 15, “The Pat Thurston Program” with John Rothmann, KGO AM 810, 11 p.m.

Oct. 7, “On the Radio” with Jon Wiener, KPFK, 90.7, 4-5 p.m.

 

Jon Christensen, Friend of the CSA, Appointed Executive Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West

Press Release – August 18, 2009

Jon Christensen appointed Executive Director of the

Bill Lane Center for the American West

The Bill Lane Center for the American West is pleased to announce that Jon Christensen will become the Center’s Executive Director beginning September 1, 2009. Christensen will succeed Tammy Frisby, who has held the position since 2007.

The Bill Lane Center for the American West is an interdisciplinary research and teaching institute founded in 2002 and named in 2005 in honor of Bill Lane, the retired co-chairman of the board of Lane Publishing Company, longtime publisher of Sunset magazine, and former United States Ambassador to Australia and Nauru.

The Center is dedicated to advancing scholarly and public understanding of the West’s past, present, and future. It supports research, teaching, and reporting about land and life in the western half of the continent, including the trans-Mississippi United States, Canada west of Ontario, and all of Mexico. Current research programs address issues of western water supply and management, California constitutional reform, and the social, economic, environmental, and cultural status of the rural West. The Center also sponsors both undergraduate and graduate courses concerning the region, offers student internships as well as research fellowships for visiting scholars and journalists, and organizes lectures, conferences, symposia, media programming, and continuing education programs aimed at a broad public audience.

The Executive Director is the Center’s chief operational, strategic, and development officer, reporting to the Center’s Faculty Directors, David M. Kennedy and Richard White, both in the History Department.

Christensen brings to the executive directorship a deep interest in the West cultivated in his 21 years as an environmental journalist and science writer. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the western regional newspaper High Country News, and many other newspapers, magazines, journals, and public radio and television shows. He was a Knight Professional Journalism Fellow at Stanford in 2002-2003 and a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University in 2003-2004. He is now finishing his Ph.D. in the Department of History at Stanford and has served as Associate Director of the Spatial History Project under the auspices of the Bill Lane Center. His dissertation, “Critical Habitat,” is a history of ideas, narratives, science, land use change, conservation practices, and the extinction of a species – the Bay checkerspot butterfly — in time and space. His broader research and teaching interests include environmental history, natural history, and the history of the biological and ecological sciences, climate change, conservation, and journalism.

Richard White, Christensen’s principal dissertation adviser, said that “Christensen brings to the Bill Lane Center a deep personal familiarity with the West, two decades of experience as a journalist reporting on the region, its environment, and its people, and a scholarly interest in both its past and its future. With his interests in history, public policy, and the contemporary West and its people, he is a perfect fit for the Bill Lane Center.” Kennedy added that “Jon’s creativity and energy, his deep roots in the West and his passion for its landscapes and its fate constitute a fine match with the Bill Lane Center’s mission. We look forward to his long and productive tenure as Executive Director.”

For more information about the Bill Lane Center for the American West visit: http://west.stanford.edu

Sue Purdy Pelosi

Publicity and Events

The Bill Lane Center for  the West

Y2E2 Room 347

Stanford University MC 4225

(650)721-2252

fax( 650) 721-3223

http://west.stanford.edu/

 

A New Issue of Southern California Quarterly has been published

The Historical Society of Southern California has published a new issue of Southern California Quarterly (Summer 2009, Vol. 91, No. 2).  The contents include the following three articles:

“Keeping Alive the Old Tradition”: Spanish-Mexican Club Women in Southern California, 1880-1940,” by Eileen V. Wallis;

“African-American Leisure Space in Santa Monica: the Beach Sometimes Known as the Inkwell, 1990s – 1960s,” by Alison Rose Jefferson; and

“Delano Diary: the Visual Adventure and Social Documentary Work of Jon Lewis, Photographer of the Delano, California Grape Strike, 1966-1970,” by Richard Steven Street.

There are also six book reviews:

Beebe and Senkewicz, Testimonios: Early California Through the Eyes of Women,
1815-1848, by Jennifer Gurley;

Horsman, Feast or Famine: Food and Drink in American Westward Expansion, by
Patricia Cleary;

Round, The Impossible Land: Story and Place in California’s Imperial Valley, by
Erik Akenbernd;

Sanchez-Jankowski, Cracks in the Pavement: Social Change and Resilience in Poor
Neighborhoods, by Elaine Lewinnek;

Griswold del Castillo, ed., Chicano San Diego: Cultural Space and the Struggle for
Justice, by Jerry Gonzalez; and

Schrank, Art and the City: Civic Imagination and Cultural Authority in Los Angeles, by Thomas W. Devine.

Southern California Quarterly is not published on-line, only in print, but it is well worth joining the Historical Society to receive a subscription to the journal. –Frank Gruber

 

Hector Tobar in the LA Times: “California is free, vibrant and diverse”

The estimable Hector Tobar in his column today (7/28) in the L.A. Times makes the case that for all its troubles, nostalgia is just nostalgia, and in many ways, California’s golden age is now.  To bolster his points, he interviews historian Kevin Starr, who points out to him that for all its troubles, California is a much more just place than it was when it seemed that government worked like a well-oiled machine.

Tobar and Starr focus on two monuments to California history, the now-nearly forgotten Ft. Moore Pioneer Memorial on Hill Street in downtown L.A., dedicated in 1957, and a more recent monument, to the 1847 Treaty of Cahuenga, at the Universal City Red Line subway stop.  About the latter monument, Tobar writes:

The brightly colored tile murals installed by Margaret Garcia inside the Universal City Metro Station are under the site of the signing of the 1847 Treaty of Cahuenga, which brought an end to the fighting in California.

A fraction of the size of the Ft. Moore memorial, they detail the exploits of the U.S. military men like John Charles Fremont, but also the courage of the Californio resistance leaders like Doña Bernarda Ruiz.

It was Ruiz who helped make the treaty possible, by writing a letter to Fremont proposing “to put an end to the war . . . upon such just and friendly terms of compromise as would make the peace acceptable and enduring.”

This newer monument may be buried under the Hollywood Freeway, but I think its message of compromise and diversity deserves to last a little longer.

To read the whole column, click here.

 

California Journal of Politics & Policy:

The online California Journal of Politics and Policy has published new articles.  To link to the journal, click here.

 

Newish Blog: The Edge of the American West

Eric Rauschway’s blog called “The Edge of the West” has some interesting content on the West and a smattering of other national politics and culture. It’s a very good one for western historians and seems to be getting a lot of traffic.–ed

About The Edge of the American West

* Ari Kelman, Kathy Olmsted, and Eric Rauchway teach history at a fine public university at the western edge of the American West.

* Scott Eric Kaufman earned a doctorate in English at a closely related fine public university in a similar location.

* Neddy Merrill teaches philosophy at an American liberal arts college.

* David H. Noon teaches history at a fine public university at one of the many edges in the American West.

* Dana McCourt is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at an American university.

* Vance Maverick holds a PhD in computer science and develops software at the westernmost edge of the American West.

* David Silbey teaches history at a small American university that is, technically, in an extremely eastern part of the American West.

Your guess is as good as ours, but this blog seems to be about history, philosophy, literature, and selected political and cultural observations with a strong bias toward yiddishkeit, WASPhood, the 1980s, Canadiana and, most of all, the Muppets.

 

Hidden Stories in Santa Monica: African American Beach Culture, 1900s-1960s

Hidden Stories in Santa Monica: African American Beach… – Eventbrite.

Hidden Stories in Santa Monica: African American Beach Culture at the Site Controversially Known as “the Inkwell”, 1900s-1960s, lecture with Alison Rose Jefferson

Tuesday, July 28, 2009 from 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM (PT)

Santa Monica, CA

5:15-6:15PM Docent tours at the Guest House

6:30PM Lecture

In 2007 Ms. Jefferson created the language engraved on the plaque: “The Ink Well”: A Place of Celebration and Pain, that graces a marker in the City of Santa Monica located along Ocean Front Walk at the end of Bay Street. The monument commemorates the Jim Crow era beach site used by African Americans as a gathering place and Nick Gabaldon, the first identified surfer of African American and Mexican descent. Her independent research, of people and places which have been overlooked in the ‘collective memory’ of the heritage of the Southern California region, also resulted in the 2005 designation of Phillips Chapel, a 100-year-old African American church as a Landmark in the City of Santa Monica. An article on her research will appear in Southern California Quarterly, Summer/July 2009 issue. Ms. Jefferson earned a Master’s degree in Historic Preservation in 2007 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and has a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from Pomona College in Claremont, California.
Stop by early for Beach House tours by docents from the Santa Monica Conservancy before every evening event, first come, first served.

Tickets: All events are free but seating is limited and reservations are required. If you would like to attend, please reserve online. Please plan to arrive by 6:15pm to retain your reservation. Late seating is not guaranteed. To adjust or cancel your reservation for this event, email beachhouse@smgov.net. We appreciate your keeping in touch!

Parking and Driving directions: From the Pacific Coast Highway north of California Incline, turn at the Beach House Way traffic light into convenient parking ($4/hr, $8/day, disabled placards and Santa Monica senior beach parking passes accepted).

Other events:

To view & make reservations for other Beach=Culture events, visit http://www.eventbrite.com/org/199463539/

For more information about events at the Beach House, visit http://beachhouse.smgov.net/plan-your-day/events-and-happenings.aspx

 

Kevin Starr interviewed by Patt Morrison in the LA Times

The LA Times today features a charming interview of Kevin Starr by Patt Morrison as the historian’s latest and perhaps last book on California’s history, Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963, reaches bookstores.

 

“Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963,” Kevin Starr’s latest, reviewed by Tim Rutten

The latest and concluding volume in Kevin Starr’s eight-volume series on the history of California, Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963, has now been published.  Tim Rutten reviewed the book in today’s (July 8, 2009) Los Angeles Times.

The review concludes as follows:

The unspoken subtext of this book is the loss inherent — and unavoidable — in California’s greatest era of success. Population growth, suburban expansion and unprecedented economic development did despoil many places that held a kind of sanctity for generations. One can celebrate, for example, the creative, almost Alexandrine ferment that cultural diversity has given Southern California and still (as native Californians of a certain age will) regret that our own children never will sit on their grandparents’ porch and smell the perfume of orange groves blooming around them — or drive from Santa Barbara to San Diego passing quaint little beach towns strung like white stucco beads along strands of empty sand.

One feels the loss and yet knows, as Starr so clearly does, that, whatever it ultimately may mean, the dream of California will most surely die if it is denied to those who come after us. Aside from his official credentials, Starr also is deeply schooled in Catholic theology, with a long association with the Dominicans at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union, and something of the outlook of tragic Christianity informs this final volume. In an interview about California some years ago, he invoked that viewpoint’s patron saint, the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, who “called it the ‘tragic sense of life’ — when bounty and beauty no longer come as unearned increment.” California, Starr said, “is increasingly difficult, competitive, and aware of enormous challenges that are forcing its citizens and institutions to struggle mightily. The typical American dreamer can no longer merely say, as he once did: ‘The solution is that I have come to California.’ The ante has been upped.”

With “Golden Dreams,” Starr has completed a magnificent gift to the people of his native state. No other in the union possesses so intelligent, humane and comprehensive a synoptic account of its origins and development. That’s all of a piece with the author’s convincing notion of California’s singularity. He has given his contemporaries and generations to come a story filled with heroic examples and tragic caution. Most of all, it is a series of histories that — like any life worth dreaming of — is worthwhile from beginning to end.

The blog will link to more reviews of the book as they become available.

–Frank Gruber

 

Lawmakers want apology for anti-Chinese measures | Sacramento Bee

Lawmakers want apology for anti-Chinese measures – Sacramento Politics – California Politics | Sacramento Bee.

Lawmakers want apology for anti-Chinese measures

ShareThis

By Susan Ferriss
sferriss@sacbee.com

Published: Monday, Jul. 6, 2009 – 12:00 am | Page 4A
Last Modified: Monday, Jul. 6, 2009 – 10:16 am

It’s not a pretty history.

But, two California legislators say, it’s time to admit it and apologize for how Chinese immigrants were treated during and after the Gold Rush.

Assemblymen Paul Fong and Kevin de Leon are sponsoring a resolution that recognizes Chinese laborers for mining ore, building levees to create farmland and constructing — at great peril and for less pay than whites — 80 percent of the western half of the transcontinental railroad.

While the Chinese toiled, the assemblymen say, California’s 19th-century politicians passed law after law segregating the Chinese and, when their labor was no longer in high demand, tried to drive them out.

Assembly Concurrent Resolution 42 calls for an apology for forcing the Chinese to pay higher taxes on gold than whites; barring them from holding certain jobs, owning property or testifying in trials; and segregating them and forbidding them from marrying whites or bringing family from China.

California politicians, the authors also note, were instrumental in persuading Congress to pass the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred more Chinese immigration.

“It’s a shameful chapter in California legislative history,” said Fong, D-Cupertino, who is of Chinese descent.

“We should recognize this as part of our history,” he said, “say our regrets and move on.”

Fong’s great-grandfather worked in California, but when Fong’s grandfather wanted to immigrate to the state in 1939, the only way he could do it was with fake papers identifying him as the Chinese-born son of a family in California that pre-dated the Exclusion Act, Fong said.

“That was the system for getting in at that time,” he said.

Fong’s grandfather farmed near San Francisco but had to rent land. State laws on the books until 1952 barred him from owning property.

De Leon, D-Los Angeles, the son of Mexican immigrants, approached Fong about a legislative resolution to make amends for this history.

De Leon’s district contains the city’s Chinatown and one of the nation’s most diverse immigrant populations.

“The Chinese deserve an acknowledgment, even if it’s a century late,” de Leon said.

Californians, he said, have a long history of benefiting from foreigners’ labor and lashing out at them during tough economic times.

“The Central Pacific Railroad went across the Pacific to recruit the Chinese. And then as soon as a project was done, the state legislators initiated ways to chase them out,” de Leon said. “I don’t think a lot of people today know that.”

In 1879, California’s Legislature targeted the Chinese by voting to “impose conditions” to remove foreigners and protect the state from “the burdens and evils arising from the presence of aliens, who are, or may become vagrants, paupers, mendicants, criminals, or invalids afflicted with contagious or infectious diseases.”

The law was passed just 10 years after thousands of Chinese recruits hand-drilled through the Sierra Nevada to help finish the transcontinental railroad.

To prepare their resolution, Fong and de Leon consulted Bill Hing, a UC Davis immigration law and history professor.

“What happened to the Chinese,” Hing said, “is what’s happening today — let’s face it — to the Mexicans.”

Just as they have since, Hing said, California politicians then called for voter referendums on immigrants. In 1879, Californians voted overwhelmingly against Chinese immigration.

In the 19th century, racism was naked and led to laws targeting immigrants by race, Hing said.

Today, he said, many people say they resent illegal immigrants because they don’t wait their turn and enter legally.

What many people don’t realize is that there is no line for many foreigners to join, Hing said, adding that the immigration system has encouraged unlawful entry because visas don’t exist anymore for most of the jobs immigrants fill in the United States.

The Assembly Judiciary Committee passed the Chinese resolution on June 23, with no opposition.

Assemblyman Steve Knight, R-Palmdale, who is a member of the committee, abstained from voting. He also requested to delay a vote in the full Assembly so he could study the bill more.

“I’m not denying that what happened, happened,” Knight said. “But our job as legislators is to move the state forward.”

He said he’s worried other wronged groups will ask for more apologies.

In fact, in 2005, the Legislature passed an act apologizing for California’s part in rounding up and deporting about 400,000 residents of Mexican descent, many U.S.-born, during the Great Depression. Nationwide, about 2 million people of Mexican descent were forced to go to Mexico.

Fong and de Leon said they believe their resolution, eventually, will easily gain approval in both the Assembly and the Senate.

They’ve received some criticism, mostly anonymous Web site postings, for pursuing a symbolic act while the state is mired in a budget crisis.

But some messages were racist, Fong said, including one that said: “Go home, gook.”

 

LaborFest Schedule Now Online: EVENTS July 2-July 31

LaborFest 2009
July 2 – July 31

LaborFest 2009 Schedule is up

This year is the 75th anniversary of the San Francisco General Strike and the West Coast maritime workers strike. The ‘34 strike and maritime strike was an important point in  strengthening organized labor and bringing hundreds of thousands of workers into our unions.  In commemoration of this significant historical anniversary for San Francisco and Northern California labor, LaborFest will be having many special events including an art exhibition, presentations, a labor jeopardy contest as well as a labor film festival that will include videos of the San Francisco general strike.

There are also plans for a commemoration march and concert in San Francisco and educational conference.

LaborFest this year will also be honoring the workers who made the strike, the role of the San Francisco Labor Council and the workers who have built the Bay Area including building the San Francisco Bay Bridge, Golden Gate Bridge and the newly constructed Al Zampa Bridge which is the first major bridge named after an iron worker. Labor faces great challenges today as it did 75 years ago and the need to learn about our history, and how we won victories in the past is vital for today.

 

Western History Association Conference October 7-10. Graduate Student Travel Award.

This post from Laurie Arnold comes to us via Robert Cherny and H-California.

Go here to learn more about the Western History Association.

*****
Dear Colleagues,

The Trennert-Iverson Scholarship Committee and the Western History
Association would like to remind you about the Trennert-Iverson graduate
student travel award. This award provides $500 in travel support for
graduate students (MA or PhD) to attend the Western History Association
Meeting, held this year in Denver from October 7-10.

In addition, the cost of conference registration and tickets to the
welcoming reception, the graduate student social hour, and the Presidential
luncheon will be included in the award.

To be considered for this award, please send a letter of interest, a vita,
and a letter of support from a faculty advisor to each member of the
committee. Committee members and mailing addresses can be found at this
link: http://www.umsl.edu/~wha/awards/sgrad.html

More information about the Western History Association, including
conference information, can be found here: http://www.umsl.edu/~wha/

If you have any questions about the application process, please contact
Laurie Arnold, Chair of the Trennert-Iverson Scholarship Committee, at
larnold@nd.edu<mailto:larnold@nd.edu>

Best wishes,
Laurie

Laurie Arnold, PhD
Assistant Director
Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts
University of Notre Dame
101 O’Shaughnessy Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556
574.631.4264 (p)
574.631.4295 (f)
larnold@nd.edu

 

New Book on Prop. 13 from IGS at UC Berkeley + Companion Conference Online

Our colleague, Ethan Rarick, the director of the Center for Politics and Public Service at the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, sends us information on IGS’s publication of this new book on Prop 13. Ever timely, revisiting Prop 13 is especially critical now with rumbles of a constitutional convention and new tax policies reverberating through the state. The book contains articles from several friends of the California Studies Association.

In addition to the book, take a look at IGS’s recent conference on Prop 13: the conference is available on several video sites linked from this site where  you can also view slide presentations. IGS has other publications here.

After the Tax Revolt: California’s

Proposition 13 Turns 30

Jack Citrin and Isaac William Martin, editors

A New Examination of the Legacy of a California Political Milestone

In 1978 California voters shocked the political world by approving Proposition 13, a strict limit on local property tax rates. No state had ever approved such a far-reaching constitutional limitation of the power to tax. And Californians did not just approve it; they embraced it, rejecting dire warnings of doomsday from the state’s political, business, and academic leaders. Voter turnout was the highest recorded for any off-year election in the history of California and the tax cut won in a landslide, with 65 percent of the vote. Thirty years later, Proposition 13 remains firmly entrenched in California’s constitution, but what has it meant for politics and public policy in the state?

On June 6, 2008, the thirtieth anniversary of the adoption of Proposition 13, a group of scholars, journalists and policy experts gathered to assess the legacy of this groundbreaking measure. Their mandate was a simple one: assess what we have learned about the political, economic, and fiscal consequences of Proposition 13 over the last 30 years.

After the Tax Revolt: California’s Proposition 13 Turns 30 is a result of that conference, and an attempt to summarize the state of our knowledge about the consequences of this critical event in the history of California and the United States. This collection of essays constitutes a cutting-edge and timely review of one of the most important reforms in California history, and will be crucial for anyone trying to gain a full understanding of politics and policy in the Golden State.

Order at igs.berkeley.edu/publications or by calling 510-642-1428

Contributors include:
Mark DiCamillo, Field Poll
David Doerr, California Taxpayers Association
William Fischel, Dartmouth
Joel Fox, Fox and Hounds Daily
John Fund, Wall Street Journal
David Gamage, UC-Berkeley
Jean Ross, California Budget Project
Terri Sexton, California State University, Sacramento
Steven Sheffrin, UC-Davis
Kirk Stark, UCLA

About the Editors:
Jack Citrin is Heller Professor of Political Science and the director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Isaac Martin is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego.

--
Ethan Rarick
Director
Robert T. Matsui Center for Politics and Public Service
Institute of Governmental Studies
University of California, Berkeley
111 Moses MC 2370
Berkeley, CA  94720
510-642-5158
erarick@berkeley.edu

 

Listen: Christensen, Worster, White: A Passion for Nature: Exploring the Life of John Muir| Aurora Forum

John Christensen, with Richard White and others leads a great program called the Spatial History Project at Stanford. All historians of nature, take a listen to this conversation on KQED about Donal Worster’s new book on John Muir. Fantastic stuff.–ed.

A Passion for Nature: Exploring the Life of John Muir

Donald Worster and Richard White with Jon Christensen

Thursday, May 7, 2009 | 7:30–9:00pm | Kresge Auditorium

In Donald Worster’s new biography, John Muir’s “special self” is fully explored as is his extraordinary ability, then and now, to get others to see the sacred beauty of the natural world. A Passion for Nature is the most complete account of the great conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club ever written. Rich in detail and personal anecdote, it traces Muir from his boyhood in Scotland and frontier Wisconsin to his adult life in California right after the Civil War up to his death on the eve of World War I. It explores his marriage and family life, his relationship with his abusive father, his many friendships with the humble and famous (including Theodore Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson), and his role in founding the modern American conservation movement. Inspired by Muir’s passion for the wilderness, Americans created a long and stunning list of national parks and wilderness areas, Yosemite most prominent among them. Yet the book also describes a Muir who was a successful fruit-grower, a talented scientist and world-traveler, a doting father and husband, a self-made man of wealth and political influence, and a man for whom mountaineering was “a pathway to revelation and worship.”

via A Passion for Nature: | Aurora Forum.

 

“Watchwords in California’s budget mess” – Timothy Hodson on the budget crisis

Timothy Hodson, executive director of the Center for California Studies at Sacramento State University, has an op-ed in today’s L.A. Times looking at the budget crisis from both a historical and political cultural perspective.  From the op-ed:

A democracy needs a minority party that fights for its beliefs but also understands that its beliefs are not those of the majority of the people. Churchill knew the importance of majority rule, which is why he orchestrated the political emasculation of the House of Lords when it consistently used its minority veto to thwart one of the largest parliamentary majorities in British history.

A century later, Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) was so frustrated with the minority Democrats blocking the GOP majority in the Senate that he threatened the “nuclear option” — replacing the supermajority required to shut down debate with a simple majority vote. A compromise prevented going nuclear. State Republicans should accept that the two-thirds vote gives them both power and responsibility, and remember that Sacramento Democrats have their own version of a nuclear option.