In Conversation with Danny Widener & Natalia Molina: Third Worlds Within: Multiethnic Movements and Transnational Solidarity
Thursday, November 5, 2026, 12:00 – 1:00pm PST
ICW and Third LA present Daniel Widener & Natalia Molina, discussing Widener’s newest book, Third Worlds Within: Multiethnic Movements and Transnational Solidarity. This webinar will examine how local racial justice struggles in the United States—specifically in Southern California—are deeply tied to global, transnational anti-imperialist movements.
Register Now: bit.ly/dwidener
Born in Echo Park and raised in Venice, Danny Widener is professor of history at UC San Diego. His educational journey began at the Echo Park-Silverlake People’s Childcare Center, and it has been pretty much downhill since then. His first book, Black Arts West: culture and struggle in postwar Los Angeles (Duke, 2010), received an honorable mention for the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin Prize. His most recent monograph, Third Worlds Within: multiethnic movements and transnational solidarity (Duke, 2024), was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize in 2025. He has taught at Los Angeles City College, CSUN, and the University of Cambridge.
Natalia Molina is a Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Dean’s Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Her research explores the interconnected histories of race, place, gender, culture, and citizenship. She is the author of three award-winning books: How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts; Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940; and, most recently, A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community, which the Los Angeles Times calls an “essential Los Angeles book.”
Stewards of the Land: In Conversation with Stevie Ruiz & Jessica Kim
Thursday, November 12, 2026, 12:00 – 1:00pm PST
ICW is proud to present Dr. Stevie Ruiz, Professor of Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Northridge, in conversation with Jessica Kim about his new book, Stewards of the Land: Race and Reclaiming Environmental Labor in the American West. Challenging conventional histories that center white environmentalists, Ruiz reveals environmentalism in the American West as a multiracial project shaped by the labor, knowledge, and activism of Asian migrants and Chicana/o communities. Drawing on archival research and comparative ethnic studies, Stewards of the Land: Race and Reclaiming Environmental Labor in the American West traces the deep roots of environmental justice in struggles against land dispossession, labor exploitation, and racial inequality, offering a compelling new account of how frontline communities helped build and reimagine environmental spaces in the United States.
Register Now: https://bit.ly/stevieruiz
Stevie Ruiz is Professor of Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Northridge. His research and teaching focuses on environmental justice studies and critical science studies. He has been awarded prestigious fellowships including the NEH Long Term Fellowship at the Huntington Library and the Institute for American Cultures (IAC) Visiting Scholar Award at UCLA. His recent book, Stewards of the Land: Race and Reclaiming Environmental Labor in the American West was published in April 2026 by the University of North Carolina Press.
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.
Steve Aron’s “The Strange Career of the Frontier”
Saturday, November 21, 2026, 10:00am – 12:30pm PST
Join ICW and the San Gabriel Valley Humanities Center for a workshop discussion of Steve Aron’s “The Strange Career of the Frontier” on November 21st at 10:00 a.m. at the San Gabriel Humanities Center (414 S Mission Dr, San Gabriel, CA 91776).
Steve’s essay is envisioned to be the first chapter of The Oxford Handbook of the North American West (edited by Louis Warren and Rachel St. John). It traces the career of the frontier as the wellspring of western American history, tracking precursors to Frederick Jackson Turner, the overlapping but also contesting interpretation of Theodore Roosevelt, and the long shadow that Turner’s “frontier thesis” cast over the field. It turns then to the efforts of “New Western Historians” to escape from Turner’s trail by privileging “place” over “process,” a fixed region over a moving frontier, and currents running in multiple directions over ones that ran exclusively from east to west. The chapter concludes with an examination of how the frontier has endured, even as contending constructs now crowd the field. As recent scholarship has foregrounded, would be competitors work well alongside frontier to illuminate a larger, if less liberating, history of the American West.
Immediately following the discussion, historian Steve Hackel will lead the group on a tour of San Gabriel Mission and grounds.
Please RSVP to attend, and the draft essay will be available via link on confirmation page. Space is limited. Register Now
Stephen Aron is the Calvin and Marilyn Gross Director and President and CEO of the Autry Museum of the American West and a Professor Emeritus at UCLA. A past president of the Western History Association and an elected member of the Society of American Historians, Aron’s most recent books are The American West: A Very Short Introduction and Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West (both from Oxford University Press).
Image Source: Mules laying in dirt in unidentified western town, 1880. Huntington Library.
Racist by Design: In Conversation with Kelly Lytle Hernández & Bill Deverell
Thursday, December 3, 2026, 12:00 – 1:00pm PST
ICW is proud to present Dr. Kelly Lytle Hernández, Professor of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning at UCLA, in conversation with Bill Deverell about her new book, Racist by Design. Drawing on decades of historical research, Lytle Hernández reveals how generations of lawmakers and law enforcement officials deliberately shaped the U.S. immigration system to encourage white immigration while targeting nonwhite migrants for exclusion, criminalization, and deportation. Exposing the racial foundations of immigration policy and its enduring consequences, this conversation will dive into the immigration system’s origins and how we might reimagine its future.
Register Now: https://bit.ly/icwDec3
Professor Kelly Lytle Hernández holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA. Her major publications are Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), andBad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (W. W. Norton, 2022). In 2016, Professor Lytle Hernández established Million Dollar Hoods (MDH), a university-based, community-driven research initiative that maps the fiscal and human costs of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. She served as the MDH director until 2024 and now serves as the initiative’s principal advisor. For her historical and contemporary work, Professor Lytle Hernández was named a 2019MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She is also a past president of the Western History Association, president-elect of the Society of American Historians, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pulitzer Prize Board.
John Doe Chinaman: In Conversation with Beth Lew-Williams and Bill Deverell
Thursday, February 4, 2027, 12:00 – 1:00pm PST
Join ICW for a lively webinar with Bill Deverell in conversation with Beth Lew-Williams about her 2025 book, John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law. Dr. Lew-Williams will share stories at the heart of her work, examining the challenges of reconstructing lives obscured by the historical record, and what this history reveals about race, immigration, citizenship, and the power of law in the United States.
Register Now: https://bit.ly/icw-bethlewwilliams
Beth Lew-Williams is Professor of History at Princeton University. She is a historian of race and migration in the United States, specializing in Asian American history. Her two prize-winning books are The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University Press, 2018), and John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law (Harvard University Press, 2025). She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. At Princeton, her teaching has been recognized by the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award.
California Dreams: Higher Education and the History of California – In Conversation with Miriam Pawel
Thursday, February 11, 2027, 12:00 – 1:00pm PST
Join ICW’s Bill Deverell as he is joined by Miriam Pawel, discussing her new book, California Dreams: The Making and Remaking of the University of California. Her book traces the history of the University of California (UC) system from its founding in 1868 at Berkeley through its modern evolution. This lively discussion will examine how the evolution of higher education in California reveals a complex history and growth of the Golden State.
Register Now: https://bit.ly/icw-mpavel
Miriam Pawel is an author, journalist, and independent historian who has written extensively about California. She spent a year as a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, where she began work that led to her recently published book, California Dreams, a narrative history of the University of California. Her previous book, The Browns of California — The Family Dynasty that Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation, traces the history of California through four generations of the family of Governors Pat and Jerry Brown; it won a Gold Medal in the California Book Awards and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history. She received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, one to complete an earlier biography of Cesar Chavez and more recently a public scholar fellowship to write California Dreams.
Western Edition Season 5 Podcast: Watersheds West
The infrastructure of water control looms large across the history of the American West. Western rivers and watersheds have long been and remain fundamental sites of contest and power, hope and disappointment. Launching in January 2026, this new season of Western Edition — the podcast from the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW) — digs into the complex history of how humans dammed, diverted, and exploited water resources in the region across several hundred years.
While control over water has gone hand in hand with European and American colonization, Western Edition: Watersheds West takes care to engage with Indigenous scholars about Native views of and relationships to western water. The series returns to the critical question: What does the future look like in an era of climate catastrophe? Across its six episodes, the new season invites us all to consider if we are due for a paradigm shift in how we think about our most precious resource.
LA History & Metro Studies Group
The LA History & Metro Studies Group fosters the study and understanding of southern California history and the history of metropolitan areas more broadly.
Visit the Metro Studies Group page to see the year’s events, which include seminars on scholarly works-in-progress, book lectures, and panel discussions on contemporary issues facing southern California and American cities.