Bancroftiana, Number 117 Fall 2000: Jim Holliday Receives Hubert Howe Bancroft Award

Jim Holliday Receives Hubert Howe Bancroft Award

At the Fifty-Third Annual Meeting of the Friends of The Bancroft Library on April 15, 2000, the third Hubert Howe Bancroft Award, given in recognition of distinguished service to historical scholarship in the tradition of the founder of The Bancroft Library, was presented to Dr. J.S. Holliday for a lifetime of scholarship on the early history of California and for his distinguished leadership of California cultural and historical institutions, including The Bancroft Library.

Jim Holliday (left), H.H. Bancroft Award recipient, receives congratulations from Charles Faulhaber.

A native of Indianapolis, Dr. Holliday served in the U.S. Navy for three years during World War II, then went to Yale, taking a B.A. in history in 1948. It was as a Yale undergraduate that he came across the gold rush diary of William Swain, a text that he lived with for more than thirty years as he wove the narratives of other 49ers into Swain's account of his trek across the continent. This became The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981), one of the best books ever written about the gold rush and the instant society that it created, still in print almost twenty years after it was published.

Fired and fascinated by his initial study of the Swain diary, Dr. Holliday came to Berkeley for graduate work, receiving his Ph.D. in 1958 in the Western History program created by Bancroft directors Herbert Bolton and George Hammond. After a research fellowship at the Huntington Library, Dr. Holliday returned as Bancroft's Assistant Director from 1959 to 1962, leaving to accept a teaching position at San Francisco State University. In 1967 he was tapped to be the founding director of the Oakland Museum of California. In 1970 he moved on to assume the directorship of the California Historical Society, retiring as Director Emeritus in 1985. Among his other achievements at CHS was a series of major traveling exhibitions, such as "Executive Order 9066: The Internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans" (1972), and "The American Farm" (1977), about the transition in American agriculture from the family farm to agribusiness.

Dr. Holliday's latest book, The Rush for Riches: Gold Fever and the Making of California (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), is in many respects a sequel to The World Rushed In. It takes up the story of California from the gold rush through the 1860s and 1870s, focusing on the struggle over water between miners and farmers that culminated in the astonishing—at that time and in this state—prohibition of hydraulic mining in 1884.