Posted in Institute Activities
This March! Two illuminating panels that explore the intersection of digital technology and history. Whether you’re a researcher, writer, history teacher, student, archivist, historian, or simply a history buff, you’ll discover how today’s technology tools are changing the study and accessibility of all things historical forever.
Panelists include:
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Writing and Revising Narrative History
Megan Kate Nelson is a historian and writer, with a BA from Harvard and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa. She is the author of four books: Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (Scribner 2022); The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner 2020; a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History); Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Georgia, 2012); and Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp (Georgia, 2005). She writes about the Civil War, the U.S. West, and American culture for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, and TIME. Before leaving academia to write full-time in 2014, she taught U.S. history and American Studies at Texas Tech University, Cal State Fullerton, Harvard, and Brown. She grew up in Colorado but now lives in Boston with her husband and two cats.
In 1925 the fraternal organization Native Sons of the Golden West invited the rector of San Francisco's Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Cathedral to hold a service in the chapel at Fort Ross, the first since 1841. A small group of recently-arrived refugees from the Bolshevik revolution along with their pastor and the rector of the Santa Rosa Episcopal Church made their way to this former Russian settlement on the coast of Sonoma County on the Fourth of July to join the American Sons in their celebration and to hold the first 20th-century service in the small, modest wooden chapel. Over the past one hundred years Northern California Orthodox churches have continued this unique Fourth of July tradition. Long-time Institute member Maria Sakovich will preview her keynote talk for the October conference “The Story of Orthodoxy at Fort Ross, Then and Now.”
Maria Sakovich (MPH, MA) is a public historian and independent scholar who researches, writes, and has developed exhibits and presentations in the areas of immigration, family, and community history. She joined the Institute in 1992 and received her MA in history in 2002. For many years she has been documenting the history of the refuge-emigrants from Russia who arrived in San Francisco in the 1920s and 1930s. Their experiences have been included in several of her articles which have appeared in anthologies and journals as well as online. Her booklet The Chapel at Fort Ross: 150 Years of Russian and California History (2019) will be reprinted in a limited edition for the October conference (to be held in Santa Rosa, California.