‘Early Days.’ Detail of Frank Happersberger’s pioneer monument, San Francisco, California, 1894. Photo by Lisa Allen. Cynthia Prescott, CC BY-SA Cynthia Prescott, University of North Dakota In San Francisco, there is an an 800-ton monument that retells California history, from the Spanish missions to American settlement. Several bronze sculptures and relief plaques depict American Indians, Read More…
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What I Learned by Studying San Francisco’s Pioneer Monuments
My interest in pioneer monuments began with the dozens of statues of pioneer mothers in sunbonnets. Pioneer Mothers appeared across the United States, including the bronze sculpture by Charles Grafly that now stands in Golden Gate Park. Trained as a western gender historian, I set out to write a book that compared depictions of frontier Read More…
Historical Research is a Journey
I first became interested in pioneer monuments as an advanced graduate student at UCLA. My doctoral dissertation traced changing gender roles and ideology among the first two generations of white American settlers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. I wanted to find out how migrating west over the Oregon Trail and growing up on the frontier affected Read More…
Challenging Pioneer Memory
The June 2015 shooting of nine African-American worshippers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white supremacist sparked many calls to retire use of Confederate flags not only in that state but throughout the American South. Outrage over those killings and well-publicized killings of unarmed black civilians by white police Read More…
How the Digital Revolution is Transforming Historical Research
There’s lots of talk these days about how the Digital Revolution is transforming our world. Digital technology is transforming the way that we do business (think globalization, outsourcing, and e-commerce) and the way that we communicate (think mobile phones and social media). Educators celebrate or lament the learning methods of the first generation of “digital Read More…
