Focus on California: OAH 2018

This spring, when OAH conference participants converge on Sacramento to discuss many aspects, eras, and geographies of American history, more than 20 sessions, eight tours, and an evening plenary will focus on the latest in California history.

Eminent historians Vicki Ruiz, Waldo Martin, and T.J. Stiles will speak about “California and the Nation: Past, Present, and Future” on Thursday afternoon, April 12, from 4:45 p.m. to 6:15 p.m. They will examine not only how the state and the nation have responded to one another over time but also how their contested history has in turn shaped the choices we face today.

Attendees are also invited to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of California Newsreel, a nonprofit, social-justice film distribution and production company based in San Francisco, with a film festival of seven documentaries. “50 Years of Radical Image Making and Documenting the Past: A Conversation with Cornelius Moore of California Newsreel” will kick off the festival on Friday April 13, at 10:00 a.m. “East LA Interchange,” about the evolution of Boyle Heights, and “Adios Amor—The Search for Maria Moreno,” about the early farmworker and organizer, will be among the featured films shown on Friday and Saturday, April 13 and 14.

The following sessions will explore California history:

Thursday, April 12

Bridging Race, Ideology, and Strategy: Coalitions from the Long 1960s to the Reagan Years

Constructions of Citizenship and Belonging in the Repatriation Era

Historicizing the Golden State: New Directions in California History

• Catholics in the Golden State, 1945–1962
• Co-Opting the Border: African Americans Fighting American Racial Injustice from Baja California
• San Francisco’s World’s Fairs and the Pacific World: 1915 and 1939
• Ephemeral Forums, Enduring Communities: Latina/o Community in 1990s Southeast Los Angeles

Race, Ethnicity, Recreation, and Leisure in California History

• Barrio Baseball in the Golden State: California’s Mexican Communities, 1920–1960
• Erasures and Excavations of Physical Culture in Cypress Street Barrio, Orange, CA
• Sacramento High School Sport, 1880–1900

Rethinking Race, Labor, and Capitalism in U.S. History

Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Histories

Shaping San Francisco: The Forms of History (a workshop)

Twentieth-Century Communism in the Golden State: A Roundtable

Friday, April 13

California Indian History

Latina/o Religious Politics in the 1970s: Suffering, Hope, and Activism

Maternal Health, Fetal Health, and U.S. Law, 1970–1990

Negotiating Americanization: Gender, Race, and Indigenous Citizenship in the Early 20th Century

• American Indian Citizenship during the New Deal
• Making Hawaii American: The Public Schools of Territorial Hawaii, 1898–1941
• Unsettling Domesticity: Native Women in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1918–1936

Re-Forming Narratives of the Other California: Race, Labor, and Civil Rights in California’s Central Valley

The Roots and Resistance of Contingent Faculty Labor in California

Transpacific Circulations of Japanese People and Foods

Saturday, April 14

Bringing Latina History to the Public: The Juana Briones Exhibition and the California Historical Society

Indigenous People and the National Park Service: The Second Century

Land, Baskets, and Treaties: The Forms and Politics of California Indian Histories in the Twentieth Century

Migrant Communities, Transnationalism, and History as Practice and Profession

The Politics of Punk in the 1970s and 1980s

Transnational Hispanic Anarchists: The North American Experience

Join us in Sacramento!