Form and Landscape Revisited
Form and Landscape Revisited. A webinar in ICW’s 20th Anniversary’s Considering Anew Series
Join us as we revisit ICW’s 2013 Pacific Standard Time Presents exhibit of images from the Southern California Edison archive. How does the archive help us understand technology and changes in the urban landscape? Explore the Form & Landscape website at http://pstpedison.com to engage directly with this visual story of 20th-century Los Angeles.
Zoom registration link: bit.ly/formandlandscape
Jared Farmer is the Walter H. Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Originally from Utah, he earned his Ph.D. at Stanford, and served as the inaugural postdoctoral fellow at the ICW. He is the author of four books, including Trees in Paradise: A California History (2013) and Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees (2022).
Hillary Jenks, Executive Director of the Inland Empire Labor Institute (IELI), is a leader with over 15 years of dedicated experience in managing complex organizations and serving diverse stakeholders in the fields of education and workforce development. Previously she directed professional development programs for over 3500 graduate students at UCR, led the Center for Social Justice and Civil Liberties for the Riverside Community College District, and taught at Portland State University. She received her PhD from the University of Southern California.
D. J. Waldie is a cultural historian, memoirist, and translator who is best known for “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir.” He is the author of “Where Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles” and “Becoming Los Angeles: Myth, Memory, and a Sense of Place.” In 2021, the New Yorker magazine called him “one of the most respected contemporary voices on life in Southern California.”
Continental Reckoning: A Conversation with Elliott West & Megan Kate Nelson
Continental Reckoning: A Conversation with Elliott West & Megan Kate Nelson. A webinar in ICW’s 20th Anniversary’s Considering Anew Series
Join us for a conversation with Elliott West and Megan Kate Nelson about Dr. West’s sweeping new book, Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion, winner of the 2024 Bancroft Prize in American History. The book explores how expansion, migration, and modern technologies remade landscapes, politics, racial hierarchies, citizenship, and the American place in the world.
Zoom registration link: https://bit.ly/continentalreckoning
Elliott West, alumni distinguished professor of history emeritus at the University of Arkansas, is a specialist in the social and environmental history of the American West and in American Indian history. He is the author of eight books, among them The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado, The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story, and Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion. Five of those books have received national awards, including the Francis Parkman and Bancroft prizes. In 2009 he was one of three finalists for the Robert Foster Cherry Award for the outstanding classroom teacher in the nation, and in 2017-18 he was the Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford. He lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas with his wife, the Rev. Suzanne Stoner, and their granddaughter, London West.
Megan Kate Nelson is a historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist and the author most recently of Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (Scribner 2022; winner of the 2023 Spur Award for Historical Non-Fiction) and The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner 2020; finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History). She also writes about the Civil War, the U.S. West, and American culture for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Slate, and TIME. In 2024-2025, Dr. Nelson will be the Rogers Distinguished Fellow in Nineteenth-Century American History at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
“Where You Stand: Chinatown 1880 to 1939” – Union Station Installation in Partnership with Metro Art
In collaboration with historian Greg Hise and friends at the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, The Huntington, and USC Cinema, the Chinatown History Project blends historical research with creative website and augmented reality experiences to recover the neighborhood of the original Chinatown of Los Angeles.
In the mid-1930s, the city’s first Chinatown, a vibrant, polyglot neighborhood of several thousand people, was razed to make way for Union Station, the last major metropolitan train station constructed in the United States. From a foundational database research project designed to repopulate this place with the lives of the people who lived and worked there, the project expands outward by inviting audiences and end users to see within and across layers of Southern California space and history. Where You Stand: Chinatown 1880 to 1939 invites participants into the center of the vibrant community through a multi-dimensional experience.Access the prototype of the augmented reality and details from the exhibit here.
Western Edition Season 3 Podcast
Given the nation’s widespread and often heated reckoning with sites of memorialization and commemoration in recent years, the new season of Western Edition questions six such sites across the American West from Catalina Island to Daly City, California; Jackson, Wyoming to Los Angeles; Denver to San Antonio.
Currently in its third season, Western Edition seeks to share the fascinating stories of the people and communities of the West, connecting past and present and demonstrating the tightly woven fabric of history. Launched in Fall 2021, season one investigated the legacy and calamity of wildfire in the Western U.S., while season two, launched in Spring 2022, explored the past, present, and future of L.A.’s Chinatown neighborhood.