Posted in Institute Activities
Sunday, May 21, 2:00 pm, Monthly Program via Zoom.
“One Picture — Several Stories: The Petrograd Children’s Colony in Russia and America.”
A Presentation by Maria Sakovich
The identification of a photograph found in a Sakovich family album has revealed over the course of 30 years a little-known and unusual,…
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Sunday, March 19, 2:00 pm, Monthly Program via Zoom.
“Designed for Large Explosions” – The Port Chicago explosion and the Manhattan Project
A Presentation by Daisy Brown Herndon
Daisy Brown Herndon, a former school librarian,
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Sunday, March 19, 2:00 pm, Monthly Program via Zoom.
Kissing Cousins: The Artistic Lives of San Francisco’s Albert M. Bender and Anne M. Bremer
A Presentation by Ann Harlow
When Anne M.
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Sunday, February 19, 2:00 pm, Monthly Program via Zoom
The Who, What, When, Where, How and Why of Paraplegic Vivian Edward’s Transcontinental Goat Cart Odyssey, 1907-10
A Presentation by Oliver B.
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Sunday, January 15, 2022 2:00 pm, Monthly Program via Zoom.
Surrealism is a cultural and art historical movement that evolved over the 20th century,
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Sunday, December 18, 2022 2:00 pm, Monthly Program via Zoom.
The Genocide in California’s Closet
A Presentation by Robeert Aquinas McNally
Most Californians are unaware that in the second half of the 19th century their state sponsored and funded a campaign to exterminate its Indigenous peoples — a mass atrocity known under contemporary international law as genocide.
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Sunday, October 16, 2:00 pm, Monthly Program via Zoom. View a video of this presentation here.
Eternal Flames: Excerpt from a work in progress
A Presentation by Jim Gasperini
Jim presented a chapter of his work in progress,
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Sunday, September 18, 2:00 pm, Monthly Program via Zoom.
How to Create Your Own Legacy Book
A Presentation by Margaretta Mitchell
Margaretta is both photographer and writer, who always brings research and history into her books.
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Sunday, August 21, 2:00 pm, Public Program. view a video of this presentation here.
Writing and Revising Narrative History
A Presentation by Megan Kate Nelson
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Sunday, July 17, 2:00 pm, Monthly Program via Zoom.
The Joy of Life:
Impressionists and Post-impressionists in Russia
A Presentation by Marina Oberatova
Russia has one of the world’s best collections of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings. It rivals the holdings of French museums—especially when it comes to the masterpieces of Paul Gauguin,
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Sunday, June 19, 2:00 pm, via Zoom.
A Presentation by Peter G. Meyerhof
In 1834, all of the 19 missions in Alta California were turned over to civil administrators who were to take over secular control from the mission priests and arrange distribution of assets including the land to the baptized Native Americans who had worked there.
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Between 1968 and 1979, women at the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center wrote and produced five musical comedies. These productions are an example of women forging a presence in an institution that barred them from equal participation in religious ritual and prevented them from fully participating in temple governance.
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A video of this presentation can be viewed on our YouTube Channel.
Saturday, April 16, 2022 10:00 am
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Its troglodyte residents ravaged by poverty and disease, its rock-walled churches all but forgotten,…
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Sunday, February 22, 2:00 pm
A Talk by Laure Latham
The French artist George Daniel de Monfreid (1856-1929) broke from mainstream impressionism early on, becoming a leading voice of the post-impressionist movement in his country.
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The internet can bring life to a tree of boxes listing who begat whom. Jim will show how – using The Colburn Chronicles,
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A Talk by Peter Stansky Peter Stansky will discuss how Orwell was shaped by his experiences of living through four wars: the First World War while he was growing up; the Spanish Civil War,
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An informal talk for Native American Heritage Month about my recent adventures in developing a group and blog site on “Honoring Indigenous Peoples,” formulating a land acknowledgment, paying Shuumi land tax,
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Bay Area author Jonathan Marshall offers an original take on an old subject, political corruption, and challenges the myth of a past golden age of American democracy.
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Sunday, September 19, 2:00 pm
Taryn Edwards presented
San Francisco’s historic cable cars have reopened! Beloved by tourists and locals alike, the cable cars are integral to the development, character, and culture of San Francisco. Join Taryn Edwards for a peek into her research about the cable car’s surprising origins and an update on the life of Andrew Smith Hallidie,
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A Wall Street lawyer’s Civil War project to help preserve the Union inadvertently ended up empowering women and paving the way to health-care reform.
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Sunday, July 18, 2:00 pm
Peter Meyerhof presented
Solomon Schocken (1842-1932) was a Jewish immigrant who rose quickly to considerable significance in Sonoma and beyond, through his own business ventures and as a mentor to several future entrepreneurs.
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Thursday July 22 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM PDT
Author Stephen E. Barton introduced his new book, J. Stitt Wilson: Socialist, Christian, Mayor of Berkeley. Faced with the dramatic extremes of wealth and poverty that characterized Gilded Age America, Wilson (1868-1942) gave up a promising career in the ministry to advocate for “applied Christianity”—a democratic and socialist economy based on caring and cooperation that would embody Jesus’s message of love.
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Sunday, June 20, 2:00 pm
David Hirzel presented
A talk by David Hirzel on the prickly relationship between the socialite and the sea captain on his famous schooner Effie M. Morrissey. When war threatened U.S. neutrality in 1940,
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Sunday, May 16, 2:00 pm, Monthly Program, via Zoom. Richard Hurley presented:
This multimedia show chronicles the adventures (and misadventures) of the nearly 17,000 young men who volunteered for the Union army during the Civil War. Moved by passionate patriotism,…
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Sunday, April 18, 2:00 pm, Institute member David Goldberg on
A Family History
a photographic historical essay using the language of contemporary visual art
This essay sits at the space where family and history intersect.
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Beth Wright (daughter of longtime IHS member Georgia Wright) will provide practical information and guidance to help aspiring authors succeed with their self-published books. The webinar will include tips on how to find and work with the most suitable editors and other book publishing professionals;…
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Sunday, October 18, 2 pm, Monthly Program via Zoom. Anne Evers Hitz presented:
Lost Department Stores of San Francisco: Six Bygone Stores That Defined an Era
In the late nineteenth century, San Francisco’s merchant princes built grand stores for a booming city,
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Saturday, September 26, 1:00 pm, Public Program via Zoom – pre-registration required
Part of San Francisco History Days, this event is co-sponsored by the California Historical Society and the California African American Museum.
Join Susan D. Anderson,
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Sunday, September 20, Monthly Program: Black History in Marin County: From the Spaniards to the Great Migration
IHS member Marilyn Geary presented unique stories of Black individuals who made their marks amid the biases of a predominantly white society.
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Sunday, July 26, 2 pm: Mills College history professor emeritus and 40-year Institute member Bert Gordon presented “Exploring the Links between Tourism and War, based on the research for Bert’s most recent book, War Tourism: Second World War France from Defeat and Occupation to the Creation of Heritage,
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A lecture with Elizabeth Pepin Silva
Sunday, August 16 2020 at 2:00 PM
via Zoom
Ms. Silva is a documentary filmmaker, photographer, writer, and former day manager of the historic Fillmore Auditorium. She grew up all around the Bay Area
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A lecture with Professor Emeritus Robert Cherny
Thursday, October 3, 2019 at 6:30 PM
Presidio Interfaith Chapel
The murals at Coit Tower were completed 85 years ago, in the early summer of 1934. They were, at the time, the largest art project funded by the New Deal, and they influenced other New Deal art across the country.
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Monthly Program for May: Exhibit Talk and Tour at the Richmond Museum of History
Sunday, May 19, 2019 at 2 pm
Richmond Museum of History, 400 Nevin Avenue, Richmond
Prof. Oliver B. Pollak will give a talk and a tour of the exhibit: Pioneers to the Present,
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Friday, September 28 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm: South Asians in the South Bay: The Privileged Immigrants – with Jeevan Zutshi
Offered in partnership with the Indo-American Community Federation and the Mechanics’ Institute, IACF founder Jeevan Zutshi will talk about the South Asian community that has developed in Fremont,
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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.
Many religions expect the end of the world to happen eventually. Christianity is unique in expecting it to happen any moment now. In this presentation, Dan Kohanski explores how Christianity came to take this position. He will also discuss the various ways the early Church tried to deal with this expectation, how it came to influence the calendar we use today, and how the Protestant Reformation changed everything. He concludes with an examination of some of the ways in which the expectation that the world might end tomorrow affects how we deal with the world today.
Dan Kohanski is a long-time member of the Institute and its writers’ group, and currently serves on the board. He has spent decades in the study of Judaism and Christianity, and recently published a book based on his research: A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World (Apocryphile Press, 2023).