What’s New

The Smolensk Newspaper, 1914 (Marc Chagall (1887-1985)

Sunday, February 16, 2:00 pm, Monthly Program via Zoom.

A Program for Black History Month: 
Black Swan Records and the Harlem Renaissance
The Story of the First Black-Owned Record Company, 1921-1923
A presentation by Bill Doggett

Black Swan Records was a beacon of promise, providing visibility through sound recordings for a generation of classically trained singers, musicians, and composers emerging out of the shadow of the Great Migration and the First World War. Obscure and forgotten in 2021, these gifted artists were cultural symbols of an earlier Black racial pride who had been rejected and forbidden to record by a white recording industry dominated by Victor, Columbia, and Edison. In a post-First World War era fraught with violent racial animus, Harry Pace’s Black Swan Records put out “open for business” signs within weeks of May 30-June 1, 1921, when the prosperous Black district of Greenwood, Tulsa, Oklahoma, was destroyed by vigilante white supremacist mobs.

What is profoundly significant in this remarkable story is that Pace, who obviously faced large systemic challenges by daring to defy the norms of an American society deeply enmeshed in racist ideology, still created a record company with a vision to create opportunity and visibility expressly for Black artists and did end up issuing important recordings of classical and blues/ jazz stars that today count as critically important documentation of that era.

Bill Doggett is a published scholar on race and performing-arts history with a national profile. He is the author of the San Francisco Historical Society Journal‘s Summer 2015 feature, “Emancipation Proclamation: San Francisco and African American Concert Singers: In Paradisum 18802000,” and co-author of “Racial Representation in Popular Songs and Recordings 1901,” for the Fall 2019 Journal of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. He was a 20202021 artist scholar for Manhattan School of Music’s inaugural Cultural Inclusion Initiative, the 2021 annual William Levi Dawson Lecture presenter for Tuskegee University, and the 2017 annual Valente Lecture presenter for UC Davis’s Music Department. His website is https://billdoggettproductions.com.

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!
 
Saturday, February 22 Annual Meeting

The 2025 Institute for Historical Study Annual Meeting will be held on Saturday, February 22nd via Zoom and in-person at the Miller Avenue Church, 285 Miller Ave., Mill Valley. Set up, socializing, and lunch will begin at 11:30 a.m. Pacific time. The business portion of the meeting will begin at 12:30 p.m. After a break, the program will begin at 1:45.

The annual meeting gives members an opportunity to meet other members and to renew acquaintances, learn more about the Institute and members’ areas of historical interest, and participate in discussions and decision making.

This will be our first international annual meeting and our second hybrid annual meeting. A handheld microphone has been purchased to facilitate communication between members attending in-person and virtually.

Please let the President Liz know if you plan to attend the Annual Meeting and if you will likely attend in person or via Zoom so that we will have an idea of how many members to expect. We urge members who live in the San Francisco Bay Area to attend in-person, if possible.

Lunch will be served. The cost is $10.00 per person. Please let Liz know if you are interested in the lunch so that we know how much food to order. Members can bring a packed lunch if they prefer.

If you can provide a ride or if you need a ride to the Annual Meeting, please let Liz know so that carpools can be arranged.

Elizabeth Thacker-Estrada
President, IHS
(650) 451-8057

Saturday, March 1, 10 am, Writers Group, via Zoom. Liz Thacker-Estrada will present.
 

Member News

Members' Recent Activities:

Two New Members
Enrico Beltramini holds doctoral degrees in theology, history, and business, with training in theology, history, and social theory. He taught theology and the history of Christianity for 25 years at UC Berkeley, Santa Clara Universi y, and Notre Dame de Namur University, where he is now a senior researcher. Author of five monographs and over 70 articles, his work centers on Christianity in South Asia, the history and theology of digital technology, and modern historiography of medieval Christianity, combining interdisciplinary perspectives to explore the intersections of faith, culture, and intellectual history.


Liz Schott, who lives in Sebastopol, retired in 2020 after a 30-year career in education, including 10 as a district superintendent. Having always loved beautiful garments, she committed to learning how to sew properly, and to becoming more knowledgeable about fashion and textiles. A podcast alerted her to the subject of her biography in-progress, Dorothy Wright Liebes, a native of northern California and influential designer who dominated the interiors landscape in the first half of the 20th century in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Hollywood. Liebes’ Sonoma County roots and early employment as a teacher resonated with Schott, who is a year into her research. She has joined the IHS Writers’ Group.


Carol Sicherman has created a blog about the foreign-born in Mountain View Cemetery). Posting it on the website Oakland History produced many responses—some offering assistance, others asking that ancestors be included. A Mien woman here for 45 years volunteered to help with the Mien community. A relative of one couple—husband born in China, wife in Brazil—gave information about his Uncle Thet and Auntie Nadir. The daughter of an Istanbul-born Armenian shared information. If you’d like to join Carol’s mailing list for future posts, contact her directly.


Bert Gordon was the commentator on the panel “Jews in Vichy France” at the 50th annual meeting of the Western Society for French History in San Francisco this past November. The three highly informative presentations were: “Occupation, Exile, Return: Sculpting a Life, 1940-46” by Paula Birnbaum of the University of San Francisco; “The Shoah’s Youngest Victims: Hidden in France, 1939–1945,” by Rosamond Hooper-Hamersley, Independent Scholar; and “On the Road: French Jewish Artists in Vichy France,” by Richard Sonn of the University of Arkansas. All three papers addressed the issues confronting Jews during the German occupation of France during the Second World War.


Pam Peirce recently co-authored an article on Reverend Frank Scott Corey Wicks, with Rev. John Buehrens. It was published in the 2024 Journal of Unitarian Universalist Studies. Rev. Wicks was the pastor of All Souls Unitarian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana for 32 years. He was well known and loved by many in the city, both in and outside of the church, for his social activism and his cheerful religious iconoclasm. He was Pam’s grandfather by adoption and the husband of Katharine Gibson Wicks, the subject of a biography that Pam has written.

Members’ New Books

Chris Webber’s latest book, Black Doctor, is the first full biography of James McCune Smith, who was born in slavery in New York City in 1805. Raised by a self-emancipated single mother in one of the worst neighborhoods in the city, he still managed to get an excellent elementary education in a school established by the Quakers for Black children. He wanted to be a doctor but no American college or medical school would accept him. His pastor, Peter Williams, the second Black priest in the Episcopal Church and Rector of St. Philip’s Church, Manhattan, therefore raised money to send Smith to the University of Glasgow in Scotland, where in five years he earned an AB, MA, and MD with honors and returned to New York City better qualified than most white doctors. He established a medical practice in New York City and contributed case studies to medical journals. Working closely with Frederick  Douglass, Smith was a leading voice in the pre-Civil War abolition movement contributing regularly to “Frederick Douglass’ Paper” and editing it occasionally when Douglass wanted to travel. He died in 1865, but lived to see the end of slavery. John Stauffer of Harvard had written about Smith and published some of his writings but Webber is the first biographer of this important figure in American history. He will be speaking about Smith at the IHS monthly meeting via Zoom on March 15th. His book is now available from standard book sources and from the author.

Bonnie Portnoy recently published her lavishly illustrated biography of artist Tilden Daken: The
Man Beneath the Paint: California Impressionist Tilden Daken. IHS member Rose Marie Cleese performed the final edit. The book, filled with Daken’s paintings and numerous historic family
photographs, is the culmination of two decades of research on the grandfather she never knew. Daken
was described by historians as one of the most adventurous and prolific landscape painters of the American West in the early 1900s. Over the past year, she has given presentations to public and private venues throughout Northern California. She invites you to attend her upcoming talk and book signing at the Book Club of California, 47 Kearny Street, Suite 400, San Francisco, on February 24th (reception at 5:30 p.m.; talk and Q&A from 6:00 to 7:15 p.m.), offered both in person and virtually. Membership is not required to attend but both the in-person and Zoom choices of attendance require registration.
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Famous in his day and a close friend of writer Jack London, Tilden Daken (1876–1935) painted as many as 4,000 works in oil, from every California state park and national park in the West, to the redwood forests and High Sierra—and beneath the Pacific Ocean in a diving bell. To learn more about the artist, visit www.TildenDaken.com. The book is also available to order online through the Nevada Museum of Art.

Mary Judith Robinson announced the publication of her Memoir of a Reluctant Debutante or When in Danger, Breathe. From the back cover: “She has had a career as a journalist, editorial writer, legislative assistant in the US Senate and House of Representatives. Adventures included exploring mind-expanding drugs that took her on unique journeys. Lessons learned were that ‘All things pass—a sunrise does not last all morning.’ She is the author of ten published biographies [five of which formed the basis of her Monthly Presentation in February–see page 4]. Her ancestors were colonial settlers of New England and New York, pioneers to the Midwest who settled Kansas City, Missouri, Lawrence and Wichita, Kansas, a founding professor of the University of Kansas, and the first Episcopal Bishop of California. The memoir can be ordered from Judith: Telegraph Hill Press, 562 B Lombard Street, San Francisco, CA 94133-7057.

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

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