Institute on California and the West

Governor Jerry Brown and author Miriam Pawel discuss the development of California through the perspective of the influential Brown family with moderator William Deverell.

Noted architect Brian Tichenor discusses the life of one of the first landscape architects in Southern California, Ralph Cornell's, and examines three of his highly significant landscape designs. The lecture is presented in collaboration with the California Garden and Landscape History Society.

David Mas Masumoto, organic farmer and acclaimed author of Epitaph for a Peach and Harvest Son, is joined by his wife, Marcy Masumoto, for a lively talk about life on their Central California farm. Through stories that offer a personal perspective on growing organic crops, the Masumotos share their reflections on the vision required of artisan farmers in today’s food world. This talk is part of the Brody Lecture series at The Huntington.

Mae Ngai, Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and professor of history at Columbia University, discusses the role of Chinese miners in the 19th-century gold rushes of California, Australia, and South Africa, and the rise of anti-Chinese politics in the West. This talk is part of the Cheng Foundation Lecture series at The Huntington.

The history of the aerospace industry in Southern California and its intersections with contemporary culture are the focus of this panel discussion, presented in conjunction with the exhibition of NASA’s Orbit Pavilion (on view at The Huntington from Oct. 29, 2016, to Feb. 27, 2017). Panelists are Peter Westwick, aerospace historian; William Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West; and Daniel Lewis, senior curator of the history of science and technology at The Huntington.

Considered the worst civil engineering failure in the history of California and the state’s second-worst disaster in terms of lives lost, the collapse of the St. Francis Dam ended the storied career of William Mulholland, the man who earlier had masterminded construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. To contextualize Mulholland’s responsibility for the dam’s failure, historians Norris Hundley, Jr. and Donald C. Jackson relied extensively on items in The Huntington’s collections for their book titled "Heavy Ground: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster." In addition, roughly a third of the book’s illustrations are drawn from The Huntington’s collection.

Landscape architect Kelly Comras, author of the biography Ruth Shellhorn, examines Shellhorn’s legacy in a lecture and short film screening.

Author and filmmaker Liz Goldwyn discusses her book "Sporting Guide", a series of interlinked stories that evoke a lost world on the margins of Los Angeles society in the 1890s.

Peter Blodgett,discusses his book, Motoring West: Automobile Pioneers, 1900–1909. Travel back in time to the the turn of the 20th century when Americans were hitting the road to explore the West by automobile. Blodgett is the H. Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western Historical Manuscripts at The Huntington.

Frank Guridy, associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin and the Ray A. Billington Visiting Professor at Occidental College, discusses the rituals of labor and leisure that have played out at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum over the past century. This is part of the Haynes Lecture series.