2014 Events

Between 2006 and 2013, artist Lauren Bon and her Metabolic Studio team transformed the area below Los Angeles’ North Spring Street Bridge into a vibrantly creative space that served as a public square, ceremonial ground, art gallery, community garden, and musical instrument. In Jeremy Rosenberg’s award-winning oral history book, Under Spring: Voices + Art + Los Angeles, sixty-six people from all walks of life chronicle the space’s many metamorphoses, and in doing so construct an energized account of change and development in L.A. Under Spring is the winner of the 2013 California Historical Society Book Award. Jeremy Rosenberg is the Assistant Dean, Public Affairs and Special Events, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

All Night Menu is a series of booklets about the untold histories of Los Angeles. Each volume contains eight addresses; each address reveals a different strand of LA culture. The booklets draw from all time periods, subcultures, and sections of the city. Their only bias is towards subjects distinct to Los Angeles and unnoticed by the rest of the world. Sam Sweet has written about surfing, music, and Southern California for the New Yorker and the Paris Review. He lives in Highland Park. 

Jessica Kim received her PhD in history at USC in 2012, was a postdoctoral fellow with ICW in 2013, and is currently Associate Professor of History at CSUN, where she teaches courses on Los Angeles, California, the borderlands, and public history. Her book, Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865-1941 (UNC Press, 2019), explores the rise of Los Angeles and investment in Mexico. The book is the co-winner of the 2020 Kenneth Jackson Award for best book from the Urban History Association. She loves combining her interests in public history and the American West on ICW’s social media platforms.

Craig Wilder is Professor of History and Head of the History Faculty in the School of Humanities, Arts, and the Social Sciences at MIT. His studies focus on American urban, intellectual, and cultural history. Professor Wilder’s most recent book is Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). In 2004, Columbia University awarded him the University Medal of Excellence during its 250th Anniversary Commencement.

Miriam Pawel is an author, journalist, and independent historian. Her recent work has sought to explain her adopted home state of California, drawing on history to inform the present and illuminate the future. Her most recent book, The Browns of California: The Family Dynasty that Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation (Bloomsbury, 2018) traces the history of California through four generations of the family of Governors Pat and Jerry Brown. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.

During her fellowship, Pawel is researching, contextualizing, and writing about income inequality in California. Through historically rooted exploration of promising enterprises in multiple domains, she will examine how the world’s fifth-largest economy grapples with building a new, multiracial middle class. The state that has long influenced the country in myriad ways will prove central to any significant progress toward greater equity in the nation.

The Browns of California was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the California Book Award Gold Medal. Pawel’s prior book, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography (Bloomsbury, 2014), won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and the California Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Before focusing on the second cut of history, Pawel spent 25 years as an award-winning journalist, directing coverage that won Pulitzer Prizes at both Newsday and the Los Angeles Times. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Alicia Patterson Foundation.

Thomas G. Andrews specializes in the social and environmental history of the Rocky Mountain West. The recipient of grants from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, The Huntington Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and other organizations, he has authored prize-winning articles on assimilation and native resistance in federal day schools for Native American children; intercultural conflict and cooperation between Hispanos and Native Americans on the southern Colorado frontier; and the erasure of labor from Colorado’s leisure landscapes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Andrews’ first book, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Harvard University Press, 2008), constitutes the first full-fledged environmental history of labor struggle. Taking as its point of departure the spiraling violence between coal miners and mining companies during the Ludlow Massacre and Colorado Coalfield War of 1913-14, the book probes the origins of fossil fuel dependency in the American West, the role of workplace environments in shaping mine worker solidarity, and the coalescence of migrant laborers from more than thirty nations into a militant fighting force. Killing for Coal has been awarded the George Perkins Marsh Prize by the American Society for Environmental History, the Vincent DeSantis Prize from the Society for the History of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Caroline Bancroft Prize in Western history from Denver Public Library, the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University, and other honors.

Brenda K. Marshall was born on a farm in the Red River Valley of eastern North Dakota, and grew up climbing trees, riding my pony, and daydreaming under a wide prairie sky. She left North Dakota after college, and have since lived in Colorado, Minnesota, Iowa, Washington, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and for the past fourteen years, Michigan. She has a Ph.D. in English, and teach part-time in the English Department at the University of Michigan.

She published two novels, Mavis (Fawcett-Columbine, 1996) and Dakota, Or What’s Heaven For (North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 2010). She also has published a book of scholarship, Teaching the Postmodern (Routledge, 1992).

Verónica Castillo-Muñoz is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is an interdisciplinary scholar with training in Gender history, Latin America, and U.S. history. She has written widely on the intersections between gender, family migration, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Her research has been funded by a Fulbright Garcia-Robles Fellowship, an NEH Huntington Library Fellowship, the Hellman Foundation, and the UC President’s Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities.

Castillo-Muñoz is the author of the book, The Other California: Land Identity and Politics on the Mexican Borderlands, published by the University of California Press (2017). This book examines how communities of laborers changed the racially and ethnically diverse social landscape of the Mexico-U.S. borderlands.  Focusing on Baja California, this book is the first to examine the interplay of land reform and migratory labor and how global migrants and Mexican workers transformed the Mexico-U.S. borderlands between the years of 1850 and 1954. Previous research on migration and border crossings portrays the Mexican borderlands as a temporary place for transitory labor, a launching pad to enter the United States. This book argues that the present-day Mexican borderlands emerged from efforts to keep Mexican labor moving across the U.S. border while fixing national communities in place. This intricate interplay shows how governments, foreign investors, and local communities, engaged in the making of the Baja California borderlands, leading to the booming cities of Tijuana, Mexicali, and Santa Rosalia.

Deanne Stillman is a widely published, critically acclaimed writer. Her books of literary nonfiction are place-based stories of war and peace in the modern and historical West. Her latest book is Blood Brothers. It’s about the strange friendship between Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill, and also features Annie Oakley. It’s framed by the Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee, and explores the spectacle of the Wild West show while Sitting Bull traveled with Cody and Oakley for four months in 1885. Part of it takes place at Standing Rock, where Sitting Bull lived and was assassinated. It received the 2018 Ohioana Award for nonfiction, was excerpted in Newsweek, received a starred review from Kirkus, was named a “best new history book” by Barnes and Noble, appeared on several “best of 2017” lists including two at The Millions, and was praised by Doug Brinkley, Ron Rosenbaum, Thomas Powers and others.