The Bancroft Reading Room will be CLOSED Wednesday, 6/20.

Please plan your research accordingly.

After being sent into storage during the 2005-2008 Seismic Retrofit of The Bancroft Library, the bust of Hubert Howe Bancroft has finally returned to a place of honor overlooking the entrance to the Reading Room.

The early history of the bust can be found here.

INTERSESSION HOURS

May 14th - June 17th
Open from 1pm - 5pm

Normal hours will resume on June 18th. Please plan your research accordingly.

In honor the 75th anniversary of the official opening of the Golden Gate Bridge, The Bancroft Library is pleased to present Shrouded in Mysteries, a guided tour of the bridge as depicted on the covers of mystery, detective, and crime novels.

Within just a few short years of its opening to traffic on May 28, 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge began appearing on the covers of San Francisco mysteries. The earliest known depiction of the bridge on a mystery novel occurred in 1940, on the cover of John Mersereau's Murder Loves Company. Since then, the span has been featured on dozens of books. With its grace and beauty, and as the Bay Area's iconic landmark, the Golden Gate Bridge immediately connects the reader to the setting of the story. Just as the physical bridge is often shrouded in fog, the image of the bridge is now shrouded with the stories told in these fictional mysteries.

The majority of the book covers included here are from The Bancroft Library's extensive collection of mystery novels set in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The final Bancroft Round Table of the spring semester will take place on Thursday, May 17 at noon in the Faculty Club.  Mike Caires, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Virginia, and Gunther Barth Fellowship Recipient will give a talk entitled  The Political Economy of Gold, Money and Loyalty: Californians and the Greenbacks in the Civil War Era.

The discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in 1848 not only marked the start of an international gold rush, but also set the stage for an antagonistic relationship between Californians and the Federal government. With their ready supply of gold, Californians resisted use of depreciated federal paper money (along with other federal efforts to regulate banking) during the Civil War. Yet as willingness to accept greenbacks came to symbolize support for the Union war effort, the perplexing matter of greenbacks proved internally divisive for Californians. How could Californians profess support for the Union while simultaneously undermining one of the basic means of financing the war? Using materials drawn from the Bancroft and other Bay Area archives,  The Political Economy of Gold, Money and Loyalty examines how Californians attempted to balance their own economic desires and their conceptions of individual rights with the growing monetary powers of the Federal government in the nineteenth century.

Although the vast majority of attention is given to the East when the Civil War figures in historical narratives, the struggle in California was of great importance in suggesting what the future of the country might look like after Appomattox.  The campus community is invited to join us for this rare opportunity to hear the fruits of research about Civil War struggles in California.  Bancroft Round Tables serve to highlight the rich resources the library has to offer for the study of our heritage.