The Berkeley Remix is a podcast from the Oral History Center. Topics include: From Generation to Generation: The Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration, Voices for the Environment: A Century of Bay Area Activism, First Response: AIDS and Community in San Francisco, and Fifty Years of Save Mount Diablo, among others.
All episodes can be found on Acast and on your favorite streaming app. Thanks for listening to The Berkeley Remix!
The Oral History Center is deeply engaged with the teaching mission of the university. Through our educational programs, we are training generations of scholars in the possibilities of oral history. This section of the website is about learning how to do oral history. It includes information on everything from day and weeklong workshops, to remote interviewing tutorials, interview tips, and graduate internship and fellowship opportunities.
If you are a K-16 educator who wants to use oral history in the classroom, see the K-16 resources below.
The University Archives documents the history of the University of California, particularly the Office of the President and the Berkeley campus.
Collections include official records, reports, publications, correspondence, digital files, maps, photographs, audiovisual materials, oral histories, memorabilia, and the papers of Berkeley faculty.
The earliest material relates to the College of California (1855-1868), the founding of the University in 1868, and early plans and activities of the president and the Board of Regents. The University Archives began as a repository of University of California printed documents in the mid-1870s. It was designated as the official repository of University administrative records of enduring historical importance in 1964.
Archival materials illuminate campus life, academic and administrative activity, faculty governance, research and teaching, student activities, sports, and community relations. Special strengths include political and activist literature, especially in the form of leaflets, and student publications.
The archival collections are used heavily by students, faculty, staff, and administrators throughout the University of California system. They are also used by a wide range of researchers beyond Berkeley, including scholars and genealogists. The pictorial collections are often featured in campus publications.
The University Archives has its own ongoing exhibition program (in the Rowell display cases on the second floor corridor between the Bancroft and Doe Libraries) and contributes to other exhibitions when their subjects fall within its scope.
The Office of the President has designated the University Archives, housed in The Bancroft Library, as the official repository for records documenting the history of the Berkeley campus and of the University of California system. Archives staff members select, preserve, and make available for use inactive records of permanent value, which relate to the history, function, and activities of the university community. Inactive records are those with no current administrative use to the unit that created them. These materials are collected by the University Archives for their enduring administrative, fiscal, legal, or historical value. Transferring records from your unit to the University Archives ensures that your historically significant correspondence, policy files, and other administrative records will be preserved for future generations of researchers.
When you are considering a transfer of records, please consult the University of California Records Retention Schedule and contact the University Archives at 510-642-8173.
Staff will visit you in your office to examine your unit’s records, arrange for their transfer, and offer additional assistance as needed. Completing a transfer form will provide a record of the materials given. More instruction details are here.
By the early 1970s, the Bay Area was in the midst of great social and cultural change. With plans for the extension of BART into the East Bay, and suburban sprawl threatening Mount Diablo and other open spaces, Save Mount Diablo (SMD) answered a call to action. SMD was founded by Dr. Mary Bowerman and Arthur Bonwell in 1971. It became a nationally accredited land trust based in the San Francisco Bay Area comprised of biologists, conservationists, hikers, cyclists, equestrians, bird watchers, artists, and people who just loved to look at and enjoy the mountain. SMD has been preserving lands on and around Mount Diablo and educating the public to the mountain’s natural values since its founding. The organization’s focus on educational programs and protecting Mount Diablo’s connection to its sustaining Diablo Range has grown substantially over the years, due in part to new leadership and the growing severity of the climate crisis. As an organization, Save Mount Diablo is both an exceptional example of local land conservation efforts, as well as representative of national and international environmental activism that extends beyond the Bay Area. This oral history project began in 2021 as SMD approached its 50th anniversary. Most of the interviews were conducted remotely due to the global COVID-19 pandemic.
If you are interested in viewing a collection noted as unprocessed or unarranged in UC Library Search, please submit the Notice of Interest in Unprocessed Collections form. Collections will be assessed in light of specific requests, and access may be possible in some cases. Generally, however, access to unprocessed collections cannot be provided.
Complete the Access to Restricted Materials form to initiate your request, which will be routed to the appropriate curator for review.
Please note that completion of this form but does not guarantee access to materials. Review of applications may not be completed while the researcher waits, nor can materials always be made available within the researcher’s stated timeframe. It may frequently be necessary to deny access entirely.
The Bancroft Seminar on Interdisciplinary Latina/o History is comprised of a collective of northern California faculty dedicated to the interdisciplinary flourishing of Latina/o historiography—from the traditional subfields of social and political history to literary, intellectual, art, film, and beyond.
Our primary aim is to provide constructive feedback on book manuscripts with the goal of assisting junior faculty to produce cutting-edge work, and we do so in a collegial, amiable environment. The ideal candidate will have time to consider the feedback as they continue to prepare their manuscript for publication, usually about a year.
The Bancroft Seminar is inspired by the well-known Newberry Seminar in Borderlands and Latino/a Studies, but builds on the strength of Bay Area historians in order to both advance the field of Latina/o studies and raise conceptual questions related to historiography. The seminar meets twice a year, and has met since 2014. Since 2014, nine participants have published their books (see below for details).
The Bancroft Library Seminar on Interdisciplinary Latina/o History is accepting proposals for its 2019-20 book manuscript seminar. The seminar meets twice a year and focuses on one manuscript per session. The seminar begins with the candidate providing brief remarks on the project followed by a faculty member serving as a respondent to the manuscript after which discussion is open to everyone. The seminar concludes with a sponsored reception and dinner. Under the auspices of the Ethnic Studies Department, candidates are offered lodging during their visit.
To apply, please email the following information as a single PDF file to raulc@berkeley.edu:
For more information on the seminar, please contact the seminar coordinator Raúl Coronado at raulc@berkeley.edu.
Celeste R. Menchaca, Assistant Professor of History, Texas Christian University
Borderland Sightlines: Vision, Science, and the Production of a Nineteenth-Century U.S.- Mexico Border
The book argues that state officials and scientists used scientific, visual, and bureaucratic methods to manufacture a border into a space to be explored, charted, and brought under control. In it, I investigate how members of the 1850s and 1890s U.S.-Mexico Boundary Commissions, surveying expeditions that determined and marked the international boundary line and examined the Rio Grande between both countries, incorporated observational techniques and technologies to locate, fix, and mark the initial line. While the scientific spatialization of the nation brought the management of nature and people under the purview of the state, it did not operate singularly in the southwest borderlands. Surveying practices collided and/or cooperated with other established ways of seeing. Indigenous, Mexican, and Anglo-European locals commanded the terms of exchange with the Boundary Surveys and inhibited the border-making process by misguiding the commission, obstructing surveyors' scientific sightlines, and/or raiding their supplies. American empire appeared as a sweeping and all-encompassing authority, however the everyday practices of local inhabitants demonstrate an orderly disorder to the enactments of empire.
Daniel Morales, Assistant Professor of History, James Madison University
The Making of Mexican America: The Dynamics of Transnational Migration 1900-1940
The migration between Mexico and the United States is the largest emigration of people between two states in modern history. Today, thirty-six million Mexican Americans call the United States home, and the twelve million undocumented immigrants in the US stand as the most divisive political issue in American life. How did we get here? How did this social and demographic phenomenon come about? This interdisciplinary and transnational book, The Making of Mexican America: the Dynamics of Transnational Migration, is the first history of the creation of modern US-Mexico migration patterns narrated from multiple geographic and institutional sites, analyzing the interplay between the US and Mexican governments, civic organizations, and migrants on both sides of the border. The book utilizes the largest cohort study of Mexican migration in the early 20th century combined with qualitative research to show how large-scale migration became entrenched in the socio-economic fabric of the United States and Mexico. It offers a comprehensive view of Mexican migration as it was established in early twentieth century and reproduced throughout the century as a social and economic system that reached from Texas borderlands to California and to western agricultural regions and beyond to Midwestern farming and industrial areas. Notably, the migration system continued to be circular in nature even as permanent settlement increased. Migrants in the US were in constant interaction with families, villages, and towns throughout Mexico. I argue that large scale Mexican migration was created and operated through an interconnected transnational migrant economy made up of self-reinforcing local economic logics, information diffusion, and locally based transnational social networks. From central Mexico the book expands across the United States and back to Mexico to show how the migrant economy spread and reacted to political and economic crisis in the 1930s. These dynamics continued through the Bracero Program and set the stage for the rest of the twentieth century.
Christian Paiz, Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley
Here Is Where We Meet: A Rank-and-File History of the United Farm Worker Movement in Southern California
Here Is Where We Meet: A Rank-and-File History of the United Farm Worker Movement in Southern California follows the lives of Filipino and Mexican farmworkers during the United Farm Worker Movement in Southern California's Coachella Valley (1960s-1980s). Drawing from Latinx Studies, Asian American Studies and American Labor history, and using original oral histories, Here Is Where We Meet narrates a UFW history that transcends its more famous leadership. It argues that everyday people, and their aspirations, were of utmost historical significance: they initiated and propelled forward the UFW Movement, and helped determined our contemporary fortunes. History, in short, often sits amongst forgotten peoples.
Bernadine Hernández, Assistant Professor, University of New Mexico
(In) Visible Bodies of a New Nation: Civility, Gender and Sexual Economies on the Nineteenth Century Borderlands
Faculty Respondent: Raúl Coronado
The manuscript interrogates and examines nineteenth and early twentieth-century archival court cases, testimonios, narratives, visuals, editorials, and other historical documents to uncover a discourse of violence as tied to economics towards poor Mexican American women on the borderlands that becomes normalized throughout dominant histories, literary narratives, and imaginaries.
Jessica Ordáz, Assistant Professor, University of Colorado, Boulder
The Rise of Immigration Detention: Forced Labor, Migrant Politics, and Punishment in California's Imperial Valley, 1939-2014
Faculty Respondent: Marla Ramírez, SFSU
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Published as: Shadow of El Centro : A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) UCB copy: JV6926.E43 O73 2021 Other institutions: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1191457490 Purchase: UNC Press |
Natalie Mendoza, Post-Doctoral Associate, University of Colorado, Boulder
The Good Neighbor Comes Home: The State, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and Regional Consciousness in the US Southwest during World War II
Faculty Respondent: Brian DeLay, UC Berkeley
Publication forthcoming, working title: The Good Neighbor at Home: Mexican American Identity and Civil Rights during World War II
Ana Raquel Minian, Associate Professor, Stanford University
Undocumented Lives: Mexican Migration to the United States
Faculty Respondent: Lorena Oropeza, UC Davis
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Published as: Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (Harvard UP, 2018) UCB copy: E184.M5 M5496 2018 Other institutions: https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1030304412 Purchase: Harvard University Press |
Genevieve Carpio, Assistant Professor, UCLA
Collisions at the Crossroads: Contesting Race and Mobility in the Making of California
Faculty Respondent: Grace Peña Delgado, UCSC
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Published as: Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race (UC Press, 2019) UCB copy: HB1985.C2 C37 2019 Other institutions: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1060178815 Purchase: UC Press |
Catherine Christensen, Assistant Professor, Palomar College
Mujeres Públicas: Euro-American Prostitutes and Reformers at the California-Mexico Border, 1900-1930
Faculty Respondent: Grace Peña Delgado, UCSC
Rosina Lozano, Associate Professor, Princeton University
An American Language: Spanish Language Politics in the United States
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Published as: An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States (UC Press, 2018) UCB copy: PC4826 .L69 2018 Other institutions: https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1008763469 Purchase: UC Press |
Robert F. Castro, Associate Professor, CSU Fullerton
Alien Bodies: Race, Liberty & American State-Building in the U.S. West (1848-1868)
Faculty Respondent: Beth Haas, UC Santa Cruz
Mónica Martínez, Assistant Professor, Brown University
Inherited Loss' Reckoning with State Sanctioned Violence on the Texas-Mexico Border, 1910-Present
Faculty Respondent: Brian DeLay, UC Berkeley
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Published as: The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Harvard UP, 2018) UCB copy: F395.M5 M375 2018 Other institutions: https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1020313014 Purchase: Harvard University Press Digital exhibit: Refusing to Forget |
Tim Z. Hernández, Assistant Professor, UTEP
All They Will Call You: The Telling of the Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon
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Published as: All They Will Call You: The Telling of the Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon (U of Arizona Press, 2017) UCB copy: TL553.525.C2 H47 2017 Other institutions: https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1002119030 Purchase: University of Arizona Press |
Chris Zepeda-Millán, Associate Professor, UCLA
Dignity's Revolt: Threat, Identity, and Immigrant Mass Mobilization
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Published as: Latino Mass Mobilization: Immigration, Racialization, and Activism (Cambridge UP, 2017) UCB copy: JK 1764 .Z47 2017 Other institutions: https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1077734368 Purchase: Cambridge University Press |
Melisa Galván, Assistant Professor, CSU Northridge
From Contraband Capital to Border City: Matamoros, 1746-1848 (PhD Dissertation, UC Berkeley)
Lilia Soto, Assistant Professor, University of Wyoming
(Im) Personal Knowledge of Migration: Imagination and Geographies in the Making of Migrants
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Published as: Girlhood in the Borderlands: Mexican Teens Caught in the Crossroads of Migration (NYU Press, 2018) UCB copy: HQ799.M6 S68 2018 Other institutions: https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1040072381 Purchase: NYU Press |
Lori Flores, Assistant Professor of History at SUNY Stony Brook
Fields of Division: Latino Struggles for Rights in the Heart of Agricultural California
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Published as: Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale, 2016) UCB copy: HD6515.A29 F56 2016 Other institutions: https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1064523663 Purchase: Yale University Press |
Tatiana Reinoza, Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College
Latino Print Cultures in the U.S., 1970-2008 (PhD Dissertation, UT Austin)
https://www.tatianareinozaphd.com/
For more than a century, dedicated donors have made The Bancroft Library more than it could ever have been if its only support had come from the state.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Phoebe Apperson Hearst funded an archaeological expedition to Egypt that brought back the collection of texts now housed in Bancroft’s Center for the Tebtunis Papyri. These precious fragments provide rare day-to-day information about life in Fayum Egypt. Many of them were preserved as the wrappings of mummified crocodiles.
Only a few years later, Hubert Howe Bancroft himself contributed $100,000 to help enable the University to buy his fabulous collection of books, manuscripts, maps, and transcribed interviews with original settlers of the American West, which form the core collection of the institution that bears his name today.
In 1956, University Regent James Moffitt donated his book collection and set up an endowment in memory of his wife to maintain and build the collection. As a result Bancroft has a significant collection of works by the Roman poet Horace, one of Moffitt's passions.
Samuel L. Clemens's daughter, Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch Samossoud, generously donated his private papers in 1949 to form the massive core of the world-renowned Mark Twain Papers and Project.
In 1972, Robert Bransten (of the B in MJB Coffee) donated his collection of 81 rare books on the history of coffee and tea and an endowment to maintain the collection, which now numbers nearly 400 titles. Thanks to his generosity, Bancroft's collection about coffee is among the best and most heavily used.
One of the great donors to Bancroft as the 20th century drew to a close was Jean Factor Stone, widow of novelist Irving Stone. She donated not only her husband's manuscripts and correspondence, but also his research library and nearly 500 editions and translations of his books. The seminar room that she funded to house these materials is one of Bancroft’s most sought-after teaching spaces. Mrs. Stone, who was a terrific fundraiser, encouraged others to donate by telling them, “The Bancroft Library is offering you a little bit of eternity.”
Contributions to Bancroft support the acquisition, preservation, display, and study of priceless and irreplaceable pieces of our heritage.
Gifts come in many forms: archives, books, scrapbooks, cash, stocks, and estate planning. The Bancroft Library staff is happy to provide information about various ways of making gifts:
In a very real sense, endowments are the gifts that keep on giving. The University has exercised laudable stewardship of its endowment funds. Endowments can fund acquisition and restoration of collections, improvements and upkeep of the building, library fellowships and prizes, staff positions, and general support. The James D. Hart Directorship of The Bancroft Library is an endowment from Norman Strouse.
Gifts for current projects let donors see their contributions at work, meeting Bancroft’s immediate needs. Recent Gilbert Foundation grants have funded the processing of remarkable archival collections that are now open for the first time to researchers. A challenge gift from the Anglo-California Foundation recently prompted more than two dozen other donors to join forces to begin an endowment for the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri. Current-use gifts also support a number of annual Study Awards for students working with Bancroft collections.
The Bancroft Library is dedicated to the preservation of collections of written, visual, audio, and electronic records that are related to California, the American West, Mexico, and Latin America. These records include diaries, letters, scrapbooks and other documents of many types; paintings, posters, and plans; as well as documentation of recent times such as photographs, film, and computer hard drives.
Archival records generally fall into two main groups: records of private individuals and the records of organizations.
The former includes correspondence, legal and financial documents, diaries, scrapbooks, and an array of memorabilia. Such records may span several generations. Many people underestimate the importance of the records that may be stored in their attics or basements. Lives both extraordinary and common help historians to piece together the past.
The records of organizations—such as businesses, churches, clubs, and professional organizations—usually include correspondence, reports, minutes, financial and legal papers, printed material, and other documentation.
It may be possible for the donors of some materials to claim a tax deduction for the value of their gifts. Here are some initial guidelines:
If you are interested in donating collections to The Bancroft Library, initial contact should be made with:
Steven Black, 510-642-1320
Amelia Grounds, 510-642-8171
If you are interested in planning a current or future gift to The Bancroft Library, initial contact should be made with:
Elizabeth Friedman Branoff, efbranoff@berkeley.edu