Roundup: February 12, 2013

Almansor Court – 700 S. Almansor, Alhambra, CA
Social Hour: 5:00PM
Dinner: 6:00PM

Speaker: Michele Zack
Subject: “Southern-minded Southern California”

Fellow Westerner, Michele Zack has given us two talks in the past five years and is familiar with many of us.  Michele is an award-winning writer/journalist with 25+ years experience as a foreign correspondent and a renowned local historian since her return to the States some years ago.  Recent of her book publications have been recognized for “excellence” by the American Association of State and Local History, and have won the Donald Pflueger Award for local history.  In 2012, she was named Altadena Citizen of the Year for her activism on the Town Council and her work with Altadena Heritage over the years.

At this meeting, she will discuss California’s legacy of slavery, a couple of 19th Century Civil Rights leaders, and the role of the stat win the run up to the Civil War.  She will focus mainly on Southern California, but also provide some often-missing context to explain why California is generally left out of Civil War history even though the state was an important cause of the war.  That our state’s Congressional representatives regularly voted with slave states through the tumultuous 1850s is seldom noted.

Michele’s role at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West for many years has been to connect the dots from local to national history.  Her investigations of the San Gabriel Valley and Los Angeles history have led her current research/book project on Los Angeles and the Civil War.  This talk will share her understanding of California’s importance in our country’s most traumatic conflict, and why it is not well understood of included in most narratives of the war.

Larry L. Boerio
Deputy Sheriff