Search results

Billie Holiday singing at the New Orleans Swing Club. Dexter Gordon hanging out at Bop City. Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane all swinging through for gigs. Was this slice of jazz history in New York or perhaps New Orleans? No, this was San Francisco's Fillmore District in its heyday. The Fillmore in the 1940's and 1950's was an eclectic, integrated and hopping neighborhood of streets full of restaurants, pool halls, theaters and stores - many minority-owned - and b...

Hula and surfing represent the quintessential Hawaiian experience. Over 270 original photographs and postcard images are presented chronologically from 1870 to 1940 to powerfully portray the evolving styles and popularity of these icons of Hawai`i. The Hula and surfing traditions both are deeply rooted in legend and myth and Hula dancing was actually outlawed for over 60 years. Surfboards were highly prized by the ancients and the sport became reserved for Hawai`i's kings. These enchanting image...

Saints and Citizens is a bold new excavation of the history of Indigenous people in California in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, showing how the missions became sites of their authority, memory, and identity. Shining a forensic eye on colonial encounters in Chumash, Luiseno, and Yokuts territories, Lisbeth Haas depicts how native painters incorporated their cultural iconography in mission painting and how leaders harnessed new knowledge for control in other ways. Through her portr...

Historian Louise Pubols presents a rich and nuanced study of a key family in California's past: the de la Guerras of Santa Barbara. Amid sweeping economic and political changes, including the U.S. Mexican War, the de la Guerra family continually adapted and reinvented themselves. This absorbing narrative is much more than the history of an elite and powerful family, however. Pubols analyzes the region's trading and provisioning economy and clarifies its volatile political rivalries. By tracing a...

The story of Baby Doe Tabor has seduced America for more than a century. Long before her body was found frozen in a Leadville shack near the Matchless Mine, Elizabeth McCourt ""Baby Doe"" Tabor was the stuff of legend. The stunning divorcee married Colorado's wealthiest mining magnate and became the ""Silver Queen of the West."" Blessed with two daughters, Horace and Baby Doe mesmerized the world with their wealth and extravagance.But Baby Doe's life was also a morality play. Almost overni...

At the end of the 1800s, when Oberlin graduate Ida May Pope accepted a teaching job at Kawaiaha'o Seminary, a boarding school for girls, she couldn't have imagined it would become a lifelong career of service to Hawaiian women, or that she would become closely involved in the political turmoil soon to sweep over the Kingdom of Hawai'i. Light in the Queen's Garden offers for the first time a day-by-day accounting of the events surrounding the coup d'etat as seen through the eyes of Pope's young s...

It's a cinematic image as familiar as John Wayne's face: a wagon train circling as a defensive maneuver against Indian attacks. This book examines actual and fictional wagon-train battles and compares them for realism. It also describes how fledgling Hollywood portrayed the concept of westward migration but, as the evolving industry became more accurate in historical detail, how filmmakers then lost sight of the big picture.

When American slaveholders looked west in the mid-nineteenth century, they saw an empire unfolding before them. They pursued that vision through war, diplomacy, political patronage, and perhaps most effectively, the power of migration. By the eve of the Civil War, slaveholders and their allies had transformed the southwestern quarter of the nation--California, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Utah--into an appendage of the South's plantation states. Across this vast swath of the map, white sout...