2019 Events

Julian Lim is an associate professor of History at Arizona State University. She holds a bachelor’s degree in literature and a law degree from UC Berkeley, and received her doctorate in history from Cornell University. Trained in history and law, she focuses on immigration, borders, and race, and has taught in both history department and law school settings.

Lim’s award-winning first book, Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), examines the history of diverse immigrants in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and the development of immigration policy and law on both sides of the border. The book received the David J. Weber-Clements Center Prize for the best book on the American Southwest; the Outstanding Achievement in History award from the Association for Asian American Studies; the Humanities Book Award from the Institute for Humanities Research; and an Honorable Mention for the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award for the best book on U.S. immigration history.

She has published articles on race, immigration and refugee law, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in the Pacific Historical Review, the California Law Review, and the U.C. Irvine Law Review. She is also the recipient of various research and travel awards and fellowships. She is currently working on her second book: an examination of U.S. territorial control and border expansions from the 1880s to the 1910s, and the correlating development of the plenary power doctrine in U.S. immigration law.

Jessica Kim, PhD, is an associate professor of history at California State University, Northridge. She specializes in the history of the American West, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, urban history, and public and digital history. Her book, Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865-1941, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2019. The book explores the rise of Los Angeles and investment in Mexico.  It was the 2020 co-winner of the Kenneth Jackson Award for best book from the Urban History Association and a finalist for the David J. Weber book prize from the Western History Association. At Northridge, she teaches courses in U.S. history, the history of Los Angeles and California, the U.S. West, and public history.  Jessica is also the social media coordinator for the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. She received her PhD in history from the University of Southern California in 2012.

William F. Deverell received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University in American Studies with honors and distinction. He received his Ph.D. in American History from Princeton University. He is Professor of History at the University of Southern California and Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, which was founded in 2004. He also directs the USC Libraries Collections Convergence Initiative. He previously taught at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Diego.

Professor Deverell teaches and writes about the nineteenth and twentieth century American West. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books exploring a variety of topics and themes. They include The Blackwell Companion to Los Angeles (co-edited with Greg Hise); The Blackwell Companion to California History (co-edited with David Igler); and The Blackwell Companion to the History of the American West. He is the author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past and of Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910, as well as the recently-published Kathy Fiscus: A Tragedy that Transfixed the Nation. With the historian Tom Sitton, he is the co-editor of Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s and California Progressivism Revisited. With Greg Hise, he co-authored Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region and co-edited Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles. He and Professor Anne Hyde of the University of Oklahoma co-authored the two volume Shaped by the West: A History of North America.  

Dr. Andrew Offenburger is an assistant professor of history at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio). His research investigates frontiers, borders, colonialism, and indigenous history, and how these topics connect the U.S. West to similar processes in Latin America and Africa.

Before joining Miami in 2015, Offenburger was the David J. Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at Southern Methodist University’s Clements Center for Southwest Studies (2014-2015). He earned his Ph.D. in U.S. history from Yale University in 2014.

Susan Straight has published eight novels, including Highwire Moon, Between Heaven and Here, and A Million Nightingales. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles TimesBook Prize, and the National Magazine Award. She is the recipient of the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement from the Los Angeles TimesBook Prize, the Edgar Award for Best Short Story, the O. Henry Prize, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her stories and essays have been published inThe New Yorker, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Granta, McSweeney’s, Black Clock, Harper’s, and other journals. She is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. She was born in Riverside, where she lives with her family.

Lisa See is The New York Times bestselling author of The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Peony in Love, Shanghai Girls, China Dolls, and Dreams of Joy, which debuted at #1. She is also the author of On Gold Mountain, which tells the story of her Chinese American family’s settlement in Los Angeles. See has also written a mystery series that takes place in China. Her books have been published in 39 languages. See was the recipient of the Golden Spike Award from the Chinese Historical Association of Southern California and the History Maker’s Award from the Chinese American Museum. She was also named National Woman of the Year by the Organization of Chinese American Women.

“At the Corner of Glenoaks and Arroyo: Collectivism and Cultural Hybridity at the San Fernando Swap Meet ”

By the mid 1980s, the swap meet industry reached its height as a cornerstone of Southern California’s LatinX immigrant and working class communities. Swap meets became a viable source of income for newcomers and helped them build social networks. Less than a decade later, swap meets faced racist attacks. Cities permanently closed locations. The mainstream media emphasized crime rates and counterfeit goods. Yet swap meets have persisted. Their resemblance to the pre-Hispanic tianguis market, affordable prices, and familial atmosphere continue to attract millions of vendors and shoppers each year. In this case study of the San Fernando Swap Meet, Brown-Bernstein demonstrates that swap meets are an enduring space of class solidarity and cultural hybridity.

“Courtyard Sisters: Interpreting Progressivism at the International Institute of Los Angeles”

On a January afternoon in 1932, a multiracial assembly of Los Angeles residents gathered in Boyle Heights to dedicate a new building as a tribute to the city’s international character and progressive spirit. For nearly two decades, social workers at the International Institute of Los Angeles had served thousands of immigrant women from their perch on the city’s eastside. The organization’s new Spanish Colonial Revival structure reaffirmed its vow to fashion worthy citizens and to model inter-group cooperation. Laura Dominguez’s work explores how this understudied group of reformers policed the borders of Anglo settler imaginations in Progressive-Era Los Angeles and contemplates the built legacy of Americanization in the city today.

Julia’s article, “Under the Canopy: Finding Belonging at the San Fernando Swap Meet, 1976-2019” was published in the Journal of American Ethnic History fall 2021.

Before pursuing her PhD, Julia was a public school teacher in the San Fernando Valley. She holds an M.Ed. from UCLA and a Bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College.

Edmund Gerald, “Jerry”, Brown Jr. served as California’s 34th and 39th Governor (1975-1983) and (2011-2019). With four terms as Governor, he is the longest-serving chief executive of the state of California.

Miriam Pawel is the author of The Browns of California: The Family Dynasty that Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation, a 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist.

David Kipen is the former literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts, and currently serves as book critic for Los Angeles Magazine and critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times and teaches in the writing program at UCLA. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Kipen opened the Boyle Heights bookstore and lending library Libros Schmibros in 2010. The former book editor/critic of the San Francisco Chronicle and contributor to multiple volumes of California cultural history, Kipen holds a degree in literature from Yale University.

Lynell Georgeis a Los Angeles-based journalist and essayist. She is the author of No Crystal Stair African Americans in the City of Angels and After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame, a collection of her essays and photographs. She won a 2018 GRAMMY for liner notes for “Otis Redding Live at the Whisky A Go Go.”

Chris Rockwell is the Librarian for the California State Railroad Museum (CSRM) Library & Archives that provides free public access to the Railroad Museum’s impressive and extensive documentary collections. With a Master’s in Library and Information Science from San Jose State University, Chris joins the CSRM Library & Archives most recently from California State University, Sacramento (CSUS) where he worked as a staff archivist for 10 years. In that role, a few of his responsibilities included overseeing assistants and staff working on various archival related projects; providing research and reference to the campus community and public; arranging and describing collections; cataloging books and manuscripts; and providing valuable outreach to the community.

Gordon Chang is an Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities/Professor of American History at Stanford University and Co-Director of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project. He is interested in several different areas of history, including the historical connections between race and ethnicity in America, on the one hand, and foreign relations, on the other, and trans-Pacific relations in their diplomatic as well as their cultural and social dimensions. He has written and continue to publish in the areas of U.S. diplomacy, America-China relations, the Chinese diaspora, Asian American history, and global history. His most recent books have examined the history of Chinese railroad workers in America in the 19th century.

Dr. Clay Stalls stewards The Huntington’s 20th-century California materials as well as its Hispanic collections, dating from the 15th century to the present. Before coming to The Huntington, Clay was manuscripts curator in the Department of Archives and Special Collections at Loyola Marymount University. Stalls holds the M.L.I.S. and Ph.D. in history from the University of California at Los Angeles and has had the privilege of serving as president of the Society of California Archivists. He has published in California history as well as medieval Iberian history.

Dr. Peter Blodgett received his bachelor’s degree in American history from Bowdoin College and his doctorate from Yale University. Since joining The Huntington in 1985, he has overseen the Library’s collections related to the history of the North American West from 1800 to the present. Blodgett has spoken and published widely on national parks, tourism and recreation, as well as the management of manuscripts and archives. His most recent projects include “Geographies of Wonder,” two consecutive exhibitions on America’s national parks, and an edited volume, Motoring West: Volume 1 Automobile Pioneers, 1900-1909 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2015).

Theresa Salazar has been the Curator of The Bancroft Collection, Western Americana since July of 1999. In 2004, she took on the responsibility for the Latin Americana collections of The Bancroft Library and oversaw that collection for twelve years. She is responsible for acquisitions related to Western Americana, from the colonial period to the present. She regularly teaches students about conducting research in The Bancroft Library.

Max Felker-Kantor has taught at Ball State as Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor of History since 2018.  He received his PhD in 2014 from the University of Southern California. This fall he joins us on the tenure-line as Assistant Professor of History. He teaches courses in twentieth-century American and African American history with a focus on race, politics, and social movements. He is particularly interested in the policies and institutions of urban law enforcement and criminal justice systems since World War II. His articles and book chapters have been published in the Journal of Urban History, Journal of Civil and Human Rights, Boom California, Black and Brown Los Angeles: A Contemporary Reader, the Pacific Historical Review, and the Casden Annual Review.  Dr. Felker-Kantor’s first book, Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2018.  Currently, he is researching schools, inner city policing and the D.A.R.E. program.

Bryan Mealer is the author of Muck City and the New York Times bestseller The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind  written with William Kamkwamba which has been translated into more than a dozen languages and is the basis of a major motion picture. He’s also the author of All Things Must Fight to Live, which chronicled his time covering the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo for the Associated Press and Harper’s. His other work has appeared in Texas Monthly, Esquire, the Guardian, and the New York Times. Mealer and his family live in Austin.

Joshua Wheeler is from Alamogordo, New Mexico. His essays have appeared in many literary journals, including The Iowa Review, Sonora Review, PANK, and the Missouri Review. He has written feature stories for BuzzFeed and Harper’s Magazine online and is a coeditor of the anthology We Might as Well Call It the Lyric Essay. He is a graduate of the University of Southern California, and New Mexico State University, and has an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. He teaches creative writing at Louisiana State University.

Gustavo Arellano is a longtime chronicler of California and the Southwest, and currently is a features writers for the Los Angeles Times. He has traveled through the Panhandle and New Mexico every summer for the past decade.

Tyler Green is an historian, critic and author whose work examines the ways in which artists and their work have engaged with and impacted national histories. Green is also the producer and host of The Modern Art Notes Podcast, the leading audio program about art.

Green’s most recent book is Emerson’s Nature and the Artists: Idea as Landscape, Landscape as Idea. It was published by Prestel in October 2021. The book features a new consideration of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s classic 1836 text, new research that reveals how Nature was informed by Emerson’s engagement with American art, and critical analysis of how the ideas Emerson presented in Nature informed American art for 100 years after Nature was published. Emerson’s Nature also examines how Emerson joined his Anglo-Saxonist white-race theory to ideas about nature in ways that helped bake whiteness into the American landscape tradition. The book features about 75 artworks reproduced in-line with Green’s essays and within the text of Emerson’s Nature. In adherence with Emerson’s landmark definition of landscape as a public commons, all of the images in the book come from museums and libraries with open-access policies.

William F. Deverell received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University in American Studies with honors and distinction. He received his Ph.D. in American History from Princeton University. He is Professor of History at the University of Southern California and Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, which was founded in 2004. He also directs the USC Libraries Collections Convergence Initiative. He previously taught at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Diego.

Professor Deverell teaches and writes about the nineteenth and twentieth century American West. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books exploring a variety of topics and themes. They include The Blackwell Companion to Los Angeles (co-edited with Greg Hise); The Blackwell Companion to California History (co-edited with David Igler); and The Blackwell Companion to the History of the American West. He is the author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past and of Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910, as well as the recently-published Kathy Fiscus: A Tragedy that Transfixed the Nation. With the historian Tom Sitton, he is the co-editor of Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s and California Progressivism Revisited. With Greg Hise, he co-authored Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region and co-edited Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles. He and Professor Anne Hyde of the University of Oklahoma co-authored the two volume Shaped by the West: A History of North America.