Suburbia
Suburbia. A webinar in ICW’s 20th Anniversary’s Considering Anew Series
Join us for a webinar conversation about new histories of suburbia in the West, featuring Matt Lassiter, Michelle Nickerson, and Becky Nicolaides.
Zoom registration link: https://bit.ly/revisitingsuburbia
Dr. Becky Nicolaides is the co-coordinator of the LA History & Metro Studies group. She received her B.A. from USC in history and journalism and her Ph.D. in American history from Columbia University. After serving on the faculties of Arizona State University West and UC San Diego, she became an LA-based scholar and historical consultant in 2006. Her work focuses on sub/urban history and the history of Los Angeles. She is author of The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945 (Oxford),My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago), and co-editor of The Suburb Reader, 2 editions (Routledge). Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Urban History, Journal of American Ethnic History, Pacific Historical Review, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post. She is currently a lead project member of the USC Library’s “Los Angeles County Demographic Data Project 1950-2010,” funded by the NEH, and is co-P.I. of the EU Erasmus+ transnational project “Urbanism and Suburbanization in the EU Countries and Abroad: Reflection in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts.” She previously served as a subcommittee co-chair for Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Civic Memory working group, and on the governing council of the American Historical Association.
Dr. Michelle Nickerson is Associate Professor at Loyola University Chicago, where teaches courses on the history of women and gender, U.S. politics, and urban America. Nickerson’s scholarship focuses on politics and social movements from right to left. She has published two books, the monograph Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right and a volume of essays she co-edited titled Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Place, Space, and Region. Nickerson’s most recent book project, Spiritual Criminals: How the Camden 28 Put the Vietnam War on Trial, examines the relationship between Catholicism and radicalism in the peace movement of the Vietnam War era in the United States. It will be published by the University of Chicago Press this coming Fall.
Dr. Matt Lassiter is a scholar of the twentieth-century United States with a research and teaching focus on political history, urban/suburban studies, racial and social inequality, and the history of policing and the carceral state. His most recent book project, The Suburban Crisis: Crime, Drugs, and White Middle-Class America, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. He is on the steering committee of the U-M Carceral State Project and the co-PI of its Documenting Criminalization and Confinementresearch initiative. He is also director of the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab and coordinator of the Environmental Justice HistoryLab, each of which involves undergraduate student researchers in collaborative public engagement projects. He has served on the boards of the Urban History Association, Urban History, and the Journal of Policy History and is a series editor of “Politics and Culture in Modern America,” published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Global Spanish Fantasies
Global Spanish Fantasies. A webinar in ICW’s 20th Anniversary’s Considering Anew Series
Drs. Phoebe Young, Caroline Collins, and Genevieve Carpio will discuss the evidence of cultural and environmental exchange between the West and the Pacific World through the impact of the Spanish past.
Zoom registration link: https://bit.ly/spanishfantasy
Dr. Caroline Collins is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at UC Irvine and an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at UC San Diego where she is also affiliated with the Democracy Lab and the Indigenous Futures Institute. Her work examines public remembrances of the American West through archival methods, ethnographic study, media production, and public history exhibition. Dr. Collins is currently working with UC Press on her first book manuscript exploring the making of race and place at Old Town San Diego State Historic Park.
Dr. Genevieve Carpio is an associate professor in UCLA’s Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies, where she teaches courses in US history, suburban studies, and spatial theory. She is the author of Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race (University of California Press, 2019). Professor Carpio’s current book project examines cultural exchange between California and the Pacific World through the transit of Spanish Mission architecture. An article drawn from this project, “Zorro Down Under,” earned the Western History Association’s Michael P. Malone Award for the best article on state history in North America.
Dr. Phoebe Young is Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder where she teaches cultural and environmental history of the modern US and the American West. Her first book, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (University of California Press, 2006), examined public memories of the Spanish past, the built environment, regional development, and race relations in Southern California between the 1880s and the 1930s. Her most recent book, Camping Grounds: Public Nature in America from the Civil War to Occupy (Oxford University Press, 2021), traced the hidden history of camping and the outdoors in American life that connects a familiar recreational pastime to camps for functional needs and political purposes. Camping Grounds won the 2022 Norris and Carol Hundley Award from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. She is also co-editor of a book series at the University of Washington Press on “The Outdoors: Recreation, Environment, and Culture.”
“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.here.
Access the prototype of the augmented reality and details from the exhibitWestern 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.