Webcasts

Mark Twain Autobiography
November 9, 2010: The world's largest archive of Mark Twain's writings is located at The Bancroft Library on the UC Berkeley campus. Working inside this archive is an award-winning team of scholars dedicated to collecting, preserving, understanding, editing and publishing authoritative critical editions of everything Mark Twain wrote, both in print and electronically as e-books and as an online reference. The Mark Twain Project's editors are now producing the first complete and reliable edition of the Autobiography of Mark Twain.; Watch webcast

1810 ~ 1910 ~ 2010 Mexico's Unfinished Revolutions
October 22, 2010: The symposium on the movements of 1810 and 1910 has a double goal: to reflect on what they meant for their participants and on the ways they left an undeniable imprint on Mexican culture, through socio-cultural policies or questions that emerged during these struggles and still await a possible resolution. This conference will address topics such as the problematic relationships between ethnic groups and genders, between state and church, and the important theme of social justice.; Watch webcast

Tour of the Mark Twain Project and Papers
May 26, 2010: Robert Hirst, curator of The Mark Twain Papers, talks about the resources available at the Mark Twain Project and Papers housed in the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. Hirst also explains the editing and publication process as well as the sources of selected historical items.; Watch webcast

The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Friends of The Bancroft Library
May 1, 2010: Presentation of the Hubert Howe Bancroft Award to Dr. W. Michael Mathes, Historian of Mexico, along with the presentation of Graduate and Undergraduate Fellowships and Prizes.; Watch webcast

Literature as Resistance: A Lecture by Kader Abdolah
April 15, 2010: A lecture given by the award winning Iranian-Dutch novelist, journalist Kader Abdolah, to inaugurate the exhibition titled "Dutch Clandestine Literature" displayed in the Doe Library's Brown Gallery. As a student in Tehran, Abdolah joined a secret, leftist, underground group opposed to the dictatorship of the Shah and later the Ayatollah Khomeini regime. Before fleeing Iran Abdolah contributed articles to an underground journal, and he also clandestinely published two books. Upon leaving Iran, Abdolah attained political refugee status in the Netherlands where he has lived since and has had a prodigious, award-winning literary career writing in Dutch.; Watch webcast

The Bancroft Library at 150 - A Sesquicentennial Symposium
March 6, 2010: Although The Bancroft Library officially dates from 1905, when the University of California acquired Hubert Howe Bancroft’s personal library, it was actually born some forty-five years earlier, when Bancroft, assisting the editor of a projected guide book to the western states, discovered seventy-five volumes pertaining to California and the West on the shelves of his own San Francisco bookstore. By 1870 his library had grown to 15,000 volumes and Bancroft, ever the entrepreneur, decided to use it to write a history of California. The final work encompassed thirty-nine volumes, covering The Native Races, Central America, Mexico, the North Mexican States and Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, California, The Northwest Coast, Alaska, and the remainder of the American West.; Watch webcast

Bancroft Centennial Symposium
February 10-11, 2007: UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library presents a two-day symposium celebrating their 100 years of collecting rare and historic documents. Ancient Egypt, CA history, biotechnology, Mark Twain, and the environmental movement are a few of the topics discussed by three dozen scholars and activists.; Watch webcast