Monthly Program – Museum Exhibit Talk and Tour

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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, The Jews of Richmond and Contra Costa County. He writes:

Get involved. That was my mantra when I arrived in Richmond in November 2016. Use the skills and tactics developed during 42 years in Nebraska in the Bay Area. Voila, two years later “Pioneers to the Present, The Jews of Richmond and Contra Costa County” opened at the Richmond Museum of History. How often do you hear it, “I didn’t know there were Jews in Nebraska or Richmond.” Jews as an ethnic group, a religious minority, as self-identification, affiliated and non-affiliated, assimilated, or melded into the larger amorphous community are everywhere, especially in urban and suburban university locales.

 

Richmond Museum


California and the West Events

Fall 2020: Revealing San Francisco’s Hidden 19th-Century Black History: A Tour of California Historical Society Artifacts, lecture by Susan D. Anderson, SF History Days (video here)

Summer 2020: Harlem of the West: The Fillmore Jazz Era and Redevelopment, online lecture by Elizabeth Pepin Silva

Fall 2019: An event-filled two-day excursion to Sacramento

Fall 2019:  Tour of Marin Civic Center and presentation by member Bonnie Portnoy on The Man Beneath the Paint: Tilden Daken

Summer 2019: Reading of Judith Offer's play, Scenes from the Life of Julia Morgan

Fall 2018: Public Program, "South Asians in the South Bay: The Privileged Immigrants"

Spring 2018: Excursion to Niles area of Fremont with historic train ride and silent film museum

Spring 2018: The California and the West study group initiated the two public programs on "The Future of the Past in the Digital Age" and Benjamin Madley's talk on An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873.

Fall 2017: Martinez Adobe Fandango; Public Program: “Siberia and California: Connections During the Russian Revolution and Civil War”

Fall 2016: Amador County

Summer 2016: San Francisco Presidio

Winter 2016: Berkeley History Center

Spring 2015: Sonoma Plaza

Winter 2015: San Francisco Public Library

Summer 2014:  Red Oak Victory and World War II Homefront National Historic Park, Richmond

Spring 2014:  Los Gatos History Museum, "American Bohemia: The Cats Estate in Los Gatos”

Winter 2014:  Tour of California Historical Society exhibition on Juana Briones, January 25

Summer 2013:  Green Gulch Farm Zen Center visit, August 15

Spring 2013: Visits to Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum and the McCune Collection at the Vallejo Public Library, April 13

Jewish History Group Upcoming Meeting

The Jewish History Study Group meets on Zoom the second Sunday at 9:00 a.m. Pacific time. Louis Trager facilitates.

Writers Group Upcoming Meetings

Saturday, September 6, 10 am, via Zoom. Ann Harlow will present.

Public Programs

Sunday, August 21, 2:00 pm, Public Program via Zoom.
Writing and Revising Narrative History
A Presentation by Megan Kate Nelson
Join the Mechanics' Institute and the Institute for Historical Study for this exciting talk about writing with historian Megan Kate Nelson who left academia in 2014 to become a full-time writer. During this Zoom event, she will offer advice for writers who want to publish trade history books and other pieces for general readers. Dr. Nelson will talk about how to make the transition from academic to narrative history writing, how to revise manuscripts for trade publication, and how to pitch articles and Op-eds to newspapers and magazines.
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.

Next Monthly Program

Saturday, September 20, 10:00 am, Monthly Program via Zoom.
The Making of a Pilgrimage: Fort Ross, 1925 2025
A presentation by Maria Sakovich

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.

You are welcome to invite friends and colleagues to attend.
The presentation will be recorded, and posted on YouTube. If you don’t want to be on the recording, just make sure your video is off. And please remember to mute your microphone!
You are welcome to invite friends and colleagues to attend.
The presentation will be recorded, and posted on YouTube. If you don’t want to be on the recording, just make sure your video is off. And please remember to mute your microphone!

About Us

The Institute for Historical Study is a community of researchers, writers, and artists. Our common bond is a devotion to history in its many forms. Through wide-ranging programs, we share research, ideas, and practical advice and provide a public forum for the discussion of history. 

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We Promote:

  •  the study and discussion of history outside the traditional classroom setting
  •  research, writing, performances, exhibitions, and other expressions of historical study
  •  non-traditional and interdisciplinary areas of study as well as traditional approaches to history

 

 

Member News

Member Honored for Book Proposal
Member Liz Schott was recently awarded the Biographers International Organization’s (BIO) Hazel Rowley Prize for her book proposal for Useful and Beautiful: The Life of Dorothy Wright Liebes. Given to first-time biographers who are not under contract with a publisher, the Hazel Rowley Prize is named after the author of Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage and who was “a passionate advocate for the art and craft of biography.”To be considered for the award, Schott wrote a 20-page proposal that included a synopsis of the book, chapter titles, a writing sample (she submitted a full chapter per the recommendation of the Institute’s Writers’ Group), comparable books, and a CV. In a congratulatory email, she was told, “We were struck by the quality of your writing, argument about why Dorothy Wright Liebes merits a biography, and organization in researching and executing the work.”
The prize includes cash, a year’s membership in BIO, admission to the annual conference, and—best of all a careful reading of the proposal by an established literary agent.

Our Newest Member
Tammy Farmer, a community advocate with over a decade of experience, is studying for a BA in Leadership Studies at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. She is the founder of the Oral History Van, her capstone project, which brings mobile oral history studios to rural elders, recording their stories and channeling their lived experiences back to the university for research and advocacy on aging and caregiving. She launched a stationary pilot, Empowering Seniors in Humboldt County, with Institutional Review Board approval. The longterm vision projects three trustworthy and visible rotating vans that will return to sites regularly to promote nontraditional, interdisciplinary historical study. She plans to pursue an MA in Public History.

Members:  Please submit news of your history-related publications, lectures, awards, research finds, etc. to info@instituteforhistoricalstudy.org.

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We welcome all men and women who have a commitment to historical study, which may be demonstrated in one or more of the following ways...

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