American History

Acclaimed historian Louis Warren, professor of U.S. Western History at the University of California, Davis, explores how Californians remade American ideas of property and power between 1848 and the present in this Avery Lecture.

Benjamin Madley, associate professor of history at UCLA, discusses the near-annihilation and survival of California's indigenous population under United States rule in this Billington Lecture

Mary Sarah Bilder, Founders Professor at Boston College Law School, discusses the responses of George Washington and Benjamin Rush to Eliza Harriot O'Connor's remarkable university lectures in 1787 and their implications for female political status under the Constitution. O'Connor was the first American female lecturer and principal of a female academy. This program is a Nevins Lecture.

John Crichton, proprietor of the Brick Row Book Shop in San Francisco, shares the story of pioneering entrepreneur Anton Roman (1828–1903), who came to California from Bavaria in 1849 to make his fortune in the gold fields, then converted his gold into books and became one of the most important booksellers in the West.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, the 300th Anniversary University Professor of History at Harvard University, shares stories from the remarkable diary of Caroline Crosby. The wife of a Mormon missionary, Crosby reached California with her husband in 1850 en route to a posting in the South Pacific, and later lived among “saints and strangers” in San Jose, San Francisco, and San Bernardino.

John Mack Faragher, the Howard R. Lamar Professor Emeritus of History and American Studies at Yale University, discusses the spatial pattern of homicide in Southern California in the 19th century. This talk is part of the Billington Lecture series at The Huntington. Recorded Feb. 8, 2017.

The Huntington presents a fascinating conversation about the practice of medicine during the U.S. Civil War and its dramatization in the popular PBS series “Mercy Street.” The panel discussion is moderated by Melissa Lo, Dibner Assistant Curator or Science and Technology at The Huntington, and includes curator Olga Tsapina, who oversees The Huntington’s Civil War collections; series executive producers Lisa Wolfinger and David Zabel; and series medical history advisor Shauna Devine. Recorded Jan. 17, 2017.

Woody Holton, professor of American history at the University of South Carolina and the Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington, offers a preview of research from his forthcoming book. During the last half-century, as social historians revolutionized the study of nearly every facet of America’s founding era, they left one topic—the battlefield—to traditional historians. Until now. This talk is part of the Distinguished Fellow Lecture Series at The Huntington. Recorded Oct. 24, 2016.

Christopher Brown, professor of history at Columbia University, explores the relationship between two themes in American history that are usually treated separately. Brown discusses the impact the war for American independence had on the economics and politics of the slave trade, and vice versa. This talk is part of the Nevins Lecture series at The Huntington. Recorded Jan. 11, 2017.

Karl Jacoby, professor of history at Columbia University, uses the story of the remarkable Gilded Age border crosser William Ellis to discuss the shifting relationship between the United States and Mexico in the late 19th century. This talk is part of the Billington Lecture series at The Huntington. Recorded Sept. 14, 2016.

Alice Fahs, professor of history at UC Irvine, discusses what we can learn from the attempts by prominent 19th-century American writers such as Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau to form communities that would nurture and sustain their art. This is part of the Distinguished Fellow Lecture Series at The Huntington.

Geoffrey Cowan, president of the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands, discusses his book "Let the People Rule: Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of the Presidential Primary". Using a trove of newly discovered documents, Cowan offers a glimpse at the raucous and often mean-spirited political machinations of the 1912 campaign, which changed American politics forever by creating the system of primaries by which presidential nominees are selected today.

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.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historians Elizabeth Fenn and Alan Taylor engage in a scholarly conversation on the contemporary relevance of historical writings on the American past. Why do we need historical perspective on our times? What do history, and the humanities more generally, have to teach us about point of view, context, and the rights and wrongs of our past and our present? These scholars and the audience will explore the answers to these questions. This program, which helps mark the centennial of the Pulitzer Prize, is co-sponsored by The Huntington, the Huntington–USC Institute on California and the West, and California Humanities.

Saul Bellow has been called the greatest writer of American prose of the 20th century. Zachary Leader, professor of English literature at the University of Roehampton, explores this claim and tests it. This talk was part of the Ridge Lecture series at the Huntington.

Andrew O’Shaughnessy, vice president of Monticello and professor of history at the University of Virginia, dispels the incompetence myth surrounding the loss of the American colonies and uncovers the real reasons that rebellious colonials were able to achieve their surprising victory. This talk was part of the Nevins Lecture series at The Huntington.

Stephen Mihm, associate professor of history at the University of Georgia, chronicles the unlikely coalition of often eccentric entrepreneurs who brought standard sizes, products, and procedures to American business. This talk was part of the Haaga Lecture Series.

Religion and violence converged in southern Utah in 1857 when a Mormon militia attacked a wagon train bound for California. Sarah Barringer Gordon, professor of law and history at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses how recognition of the importance of religion to the Mountain Meadows Massacre yields vitally connected histories.

Shirley Samuels, professor of English and American studies at Cornell University and the Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow, examines the relationship between pictures of Abraham Lincoln and the language that he used in famous speeches.

Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, co-creators of “The Knick,” have a discussion and Q&A about their Cinemax series. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, the show follows Dr. John Thackery (played by Clive Owen) at The Knickerbocker Hospital – aka The Knick – a microcosm of medical progress, racial tension, sexism, addiction, and class conflict in 1900s New York City. The panel focuses on what it takes to bring medical history to life, and the resonance of the past for a 21st-century present. Dock Society members Dr. Richard Ellis and Dr. Claire Panosian Dunavan moderate.

Clive Holmes, emeritus fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, will provide a context for the 1692 determination by the Puritan clergymen of the Cambridge Association concerning spectral evidence in witchcraft trials. This talk is part of the Crotty Lecture series at The Huntington.

Laura Skandera Trombley became the eighth president of The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in July 2015. However, her history with the institution began much earlier. A specialist on Mark Twain, Trombley began conducting research at The Huntington as a young scholar, using rare materials in the Library to help shape her doctoral thesis. She is the author of five books. Her most recent, “Mark Twain’s Other Woman: The Hidden Story of His Final Years,” was published in 2010. As a graduate student, she discovered the largest known cache of Mark Twain’s letters, which ultimately became the primary source material for her dissertation and her 1994 book, “Mark Twain in the Company of Women.” Her other books include “Constructing Mark Twain: New Directions in Scholarship (2002)”, “Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)”, and “Epistemology: Turning Points in the History of Poetic Knowledge (1986)."

Neil Foley of the Southern Methodist University, discusses how this demographic shift is reshaping politics, culture, and fundamental ideas about American identity. By mid-century nearly one in three U.S. residents will be Latino, with most being of Mexican descent. This talk was part of the Billington Lecture series.

Amina Hassan, biographer and award-winning public radio documentarian discusses her new book, “Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and Journalist.” Miller, one of the nation’s most prominent civil rights attorneys from the 1940s through the early 1960, argued two landmark housing cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. This biography—based extensively on research from the Loren Miller Papers at The Huntington—recovers this remarkable figure from the margins of history and reveals how he changed American law forever.

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.

William Rankin, assistant professor of the history of science at Yale University, explores the links between roadside surveying markers, nuclear missile targeting, and new forms of mapping in the twentieth century. His talk will focus on the grid-like alternatives to latitude and longitude that were created during and after the World Wars, especially the global system installed by the US Army. For soldiers, engineers, and homeowners alike, these invisible but now ubiquitous technologies blurred the line between the paper map and the real world and made it possible to treat the spherical earth as perfectly flat. This was part of the Trent Dames Lecture series.

Paul Theroux, one of the most acclaimed travel writers of our time, turns his unflinching eye on an American South too often overlooked. Theroux also discusses his recently published book, “Deep South”.

Gordon H. Chang, professor of history at Stanford University and co-director of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project, examines the central role Chinese workers played in the construction of the first transcontinental rail line across the United States and about the challenges to recovering their long-lost history.

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, discusses the important role of immigrants and migration in the making of California gardens. This talk was part of the Haynes Foundation Lecture Series.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer speaks about the many ways in which American judges, when interpreting American law, must take ever greater account of foreign events, law and practices—the subject of his new book, "The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities."

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.

Cokie Roberts, author and political commentator, discusses her new book "Capital Dames, The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848-1868," which explores the lives of the women of Washington D.C. during the upheaval of the Civil War. Roberts has previously written about the vital female contributions to the nation's early years in her "New York Times" bestselling book, "Founding Mothers and Ladies of Liberty."

Independent scholar Roberta H. Martínez shares intimate stories of Pasadena’s earliest days as reflected in the marriage and writings of Arturo Bandini and Helen Elliott Bandini, members of two of Pasadena's founding families. Their personal story melds with the legacies of Old California and highlights connections with the Valley Hunt Club, Greene and Greene architecture, Charles Lummis, and even the Manhattan Project.

Joseph T. Glatthaar, professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the Rogers Distinguished Fellow in Nineteenth-Century American History, compares the great Union and Confederate armies in the American Civil War. A book signing will follow the talk. This is part of the Distinguished Fellow Lecture Series at The Huntington.

Mary Fissell, professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, discusses Aristotle’s Masterpiece. First published in London in 1684, it became one of the most popular medical books ever published in England and America. The lecture is sponsored by the George Dock Society for the History of Medicine.

Jonathan Levy, associate professor of history at Princeton University, discusses the history of entrepreneurship as an idea, focusing upon the values that American entrepreneurs have shared and created from the early 20th century to today. This is part of the Haaga Lecture series at The Huntington.

Susan Juster, professor of history at the University of Michigan and the Robert C. Ritchie Distinguished Fellow, discusses the changing nature of blasphemy and blasphemy prosecutions in early modern England and the North American colonies. This is part of the Distinguished Fellow Lecture series.

David D. Hall, Bartlett Research Professor at Harvard Divinity School and the Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow, draws upon his book A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England in this free lecture and book signing. This is part of the Distinguished Fellow Lecture Series at The Huntington.

Ari Kelman, winner of the Bancroft Prize for his book "A Misplaced Massacre", discusses the politics of memory surrounding one of the most notorious episodes of violence in the history of the American West. The talk took place on Nov. 11, 2014, three weeks shy of the sesquicentennial anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre. This is part of The Huntington's Billington Lecture series.

John Demos, professor of history at Yale University and author of “The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic”, discusses the doomed attempt in the early 19th century to promote the spread of “Christian civilization” at a special school for indigenous youths in Connecticut. This is part of The Huntington's Nevins Lecture series.

Steve Hindle explores the similarities and differences between the English and American civil wars in his 2014 Founder’s Day lecture at The Huntington. Both English and American societies still bear the scars from civil wars, each with its heroes, villains, and contested legacy. Hindle is The Huntington’s W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research.

Frederick E. Hoxie explains that over the past generation, historians have discovered many new facts about Native Americans. In this talk he examines how this new information affects our understanding of who we are as Americans and how we all fit into a single national culture. Hoxie professor of history at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and the Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington in 2013–14.

Louis Hyman offers important lessons of the New Deal, when the most transformative programs were steered by business leaders whose entrepreneurship made the postwar boom possible. Hyman is assistant professor of history at the ILR School of Cornell University. He delivered the 2013–14 Haaga Lecture at The Huntington.

Alan Taylor, author of “The Civil War of 1812,” discusses the escape of more than 3,000 slaves from Virginia and Maryland during the War of 1812. They stole boats to reach British warships in Chesapeake Bay, where they were taken on board and employed. Their help proved essential to the British coastal raids, particularly the capture of Washington, D.C. Taylor is professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the inaugural Robert C. Ritchie Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington.

Professor Sir David Cannadine of Princeton University describes Andrew Mellon’s remarkable and varied career as a banker, industrialist, Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, art collector, and founder of the National Gallery of Art. Cannadine is the author of "Mellon: An American Life" (2006).

David D. Hall discusses an alternate view of witch-hunting in 17th-century New England, which was often characterized as a titanic struggle between the forces of good and evil. Could those accused of “diabolical possession” actually have been bedeviled by everyday problems such as unmet religious and social needs or family tensions? Hall is professor of New England Church History at Harvard Divinity School.

Joseph Rezek explains how the song “Hail to the Chief” had its origins in Sir Walter Scott’s poem “The Lady of the Lake,” an anthem to a Scottish highland clan leader. In his talk, he describes how it became a patriotic song during the War of 1812, when Scott’s popularity was at its height in America. Rezek is assistant professor of English at Boston University.

Jean Strouse, author of “Morgan: American Financier,” discusses the life of J. Pierpont Morgan, the titan of American industry who not only imposed order on the chaotic creation of American railroads, but also organized General Electric, U.S. Steel, International Harvester, and served as a one-man central bank before the United States had a Federal Reserve. Strouse is the Sue Ann and John Weinberg Director of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. This talk was the 2012 Paul G. Haaga Lecture in American Entrepreneurship at The Huntington.

T. J. Stiles discusses the life and impact of Cornelius Vanderbilt, America’s first great corporate tycoon. Ruthless yet honest, Vanderbilt epitomized the conundrum of the so-called robber barons, who amassed unprecedented power but revolutionized business and donated vast sums to charity. Stiles won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for his book “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.” His talk at the Huntington Library was the 2011 Paul G. Haaga Jr. Lecture in American Entrepreneurship.

Historian Sean Wilentz discusses Abraham Lincoln as a cunning and partisan politician. Wilentz is The Huntington’s Los Angeles Times Fellow for 2010–11 and the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University.

Frederick Douglass, former slave and great African American statesman, wrote three autobiographies that reveal—and hide—many elements of his life. David W. Blight, author of the forthcoming Frederick Douglass: A Life, examines how the biographer probes through and beyond Douglass’ own story to capture a complete picture..Blight is the Rogers Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington for 2010–11. He is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History at Yale University and the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition.