Master Architects of Southern California 1920-1940, a new 12-volume series by Marc Appleton, Bret Parsons and Steve Vaught, showcases the work of the Golden Era's most important residential architects, featuring some of the earliest known architectural photography of their work. The series is devoted to the era when oil titans, film industry moguls, bankers, and tsuccessful entrepreneurs hired the most accomplished and talented architects they could find. In the premiere volume, GORDON B. KAUFMANN, the authors showcase 21 projects by the architect, including his design for Greystone, the mansion created for E.L. Doheny Jr. and Lucy Doheny, that catapulted him to the top of his field. Although his name has been lost to history except in the circles of architectural historians, Kaufmann's stamp is all over Southern California. GORDON B. KAUFMANN includes a detailed career biography that points out his numerous residential projects,as well as his designs for Hoover Dam, the Los Angeles T

Gordon B. Kaufmann: Master Architects of Southern California 1920-1940

History

Appleton, Marc

Parsons, Bret

Vaught, Steve

Americas

Angel City Press

Originally published in the 1950s, this book brought together five colorful diaries of John Doyle Lee, a controversial figure in early Mormon history. John Doyle Lee (1812-1877) was one of the most controversial figures of early Mormon history. A fervent convert, he was adopted by Brigham Young and rose to become a leading member of the church's hierarchy. Lee left behind a number of colorful diaries that reveal in fascinating clarity and detail the everyday life of Utah's pioneer settlers. In them, he describes his close relationship with Brigham Young, his experiences in converting Native Americans to Mormonism, his trials with farming and livestock, his encounters with his 19 wives, and his eventual exile to the barren wastelands of Lee's Ferry. In the 1950s, five of Lee's diaries in the Huntington collections were meticulously edited and annotated by historians Robert Glass Cleland and Juanita Brooks and published in two volumes by the Huntington Library in 1955 to great acclaim as A Mormon Chronicle, The Diaries of John D. Lee, 1848-1876. The University of Utah Press kept the book in print until the 1990s; it has now been reprinted as a Huntington Library Classic with a new foreword by Andrew Rolle, a Huntington research fellow and retired Cleland Professor of History from Occidental College. In his foreword, Rolle discusses the collaboration between Cleland, a leading historian of the Southwest, and Brooks, a notable scholar of Mormon history. Robert Glass Cleland (1885-1957) was the author or editor of numerous books dealing with the history of California and Mexico. Juanita Brooks (1898-1989) wrote extensively about the Mormon settlement and development of Utah. Her best-known book, The Mountain Meadows Massacre, is today the standard authority on that great tragedy.

A Mormon Chronicle: The Diaries of John D. Lee, 1848–1876 (The Huntington Library Classics)

John James Audubon’s sumptuous four-volume edition of Birds of America, published between 1827 and 1838, contains 435 hand-colored life-size prints of 1,065 individual American birds. A glorious union of science and art, it remains an unequaled achievement in ornithology illustration. In tracing Audubon’s quest to produce this groundbreaking work, Vedder draws on the artist and naturalist’s own writings and the latest scholarship on his life and on Birds of America. Plates from the Huntington Library’s double-elephant folio are reproduced in color, including the wild turkey, Baltimore oriole, bald eagle, and the (once presumed extinct) ivory-billed woodpecker. Vedder provides with each plate a commentary on the unique characteristics of the species depicted, based on Audubon’s own observations in the field. Lee A. Vedder is the Luce Curatorial Fellow in American Art at the New York Historical Society in New York City, serving as the primary curator of its painting and sculpture collections. She holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Maryland and specializes in British and American art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

John James Audubon and The Birds of America (The Huntington Library Classics)

Arts & Photography

Vedder, Lee

History & Criticism

The essays in this collection investigate the ways in which the past was exploited to meet the concerns of the present in early modern England. The understanding of the past in this period was characterized by a deepening and more fully articulated conception of time and history, with its roots in impassioned religious and political controversies. The discourses that arose from this dialogue informed and drew together a daunting range of genres and activities: prose accounts, polemical tracts, poems, plays, romances, secret histories, novels. Although many of these genres are no longer recognized as history, early modern writers and readers treated them as such. In assessing the uses of the past, therefore, these essays consider “literary” and “factual” writings side by side, avoiding traditional chronological and disciplinary divisions and the artificial separation of secular from ecclesiastical history. Cumulatively, they supply the context and provide a vast array of evidence for the way in which the deployment of history for political, religious, moral, aesthetic, or commercial purposes shifted between the mid-sixteenth century and the late eighteenth. Contributors include Ian W. Archer, Eve Tavor Bannet, David Cressy, Richard Dutton, Martin Dzelzainis, Felicity Heal, Christopher Highley, John N. King, Mark Knights, Karen O’Brien, Paul Seaward, John Spurr, Andrew Starkie, Arthur H. Williamson, David Womersley, Daniel R. Woolf, and Blair Worden. Paulina Kewes is a fellow and tutor in English literature at Jesus College, Oxford, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her publications include Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660–1710 (1998), and a number of articles on Renaissance, Restoration, and eighteenth-century drama and politics. She has also edited a volume of essays, Plagiarism in Early Modern England (2003), and is completing a book on the staging of history in Elizabethan England.

The Uses of History in Early Modern England (Huntington Library Publications)

Religion & Spirituality

Children's book author Kathleen Thorne-Thomsen introduces young readers and their parents to the Huntington, a former estate that now houses world-class collections of books, art, and plants. For kids who may never be able to visit the Huntington as well as those who will, this book offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at the workings of a museum. Readers will also meet the owner of the estate, Henry E. Huntington, an early developer of Los Angeles, and learn something about daily life on what during Huntington's lifetime was a working ranch. Thorne-Thomsen gives complete directions for activities ranging from designing a bookplate to making a leaf quilt to organizing a collection of family photographs. Kids will also learn about the different kinds of jobs needed to run an institution that has collections ranging from plants to paintings. Those who have been on museum field trips may know what a docent is, but they will also learn what curators and conservators do to make sure that treasures from the past will last for years to come.

The Huntington for Kids

THORNE-THOMSEN, Kathleen

Lucy Peltz explores the practice of extra-illustration in relation to the popularization of antiquarianism, the commercialization of print culture, the reception of engraved portraiture, and the rise of the amateur, the collector, and the connoisseur. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thousands of books were customized with prints and drawings in a practice called extra-illustration. These books were often massively extended, lavishly bound, and prized by their owners as objects of display, status, and exchange. The scale of these compilations as well as their interdisciplinary nature -- at once literary texts, printed books, art collections, and indexes of visual culture -- have typically excluded them from histories of art and literature. In this book, Lucy Peltz maps a history of extra-illustration and its social and cultural meanings, providing a fascinating account of the practice itself and the often colourful personalities who engaged in it. The remarkable contents of key extra-illustrated books are explored, along with the broader historical and commercial contexts in which they were produced and enjoyed. Lucy Peltz is Senior Curator of Eighteenth-Century Collections and Head of Collections Displays (Tudor to Regency) at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Facing the Text: Extra-Illustration, Print Culture, and Society in Britain 1769-840

Peltz, Lucy

In LACMA So Far: A Portrait of a Museum in the Making, Suzanne Muchnic draws on decades of experience as a Los Angeles Times arts writer to relate the complicated story of how the Los Angeles County Museum of Art emerged as the largest art museum in the western United States.
Her in-depth reporting, fleshed out with private interviews and archival research, offers a lively tale about the convergence of art, money, people, and buildings that has produced a museum perpetually in the making. Suzanne Muchnic, a longtime art writer for the Los Angeles Times and contributor to many art publications, has followed the evolution of Los Angeles’s art scene since the 1970s and traveled widely to report on important artists, museums, exhibitions, and cultural issues. She won first prize for arts and entertainment reporting from the Greater Los Angeles Press Club in 1993. Her critically acclaimed biography, Odd Man In: Norton Simon and the Pursuit of Culture, was awarded the 2002 Donald Pflueger Local History Award of the Historical Society of Southern California. She is also the author of Helen Lundeberg: Poetry Space Silence, published by Louis Stern Fine Arts.

LACMA So Far: A Portrait of a Museum in the Making

Muchnic, Suzanne

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Race riots. Labor strikes. Women’s battle for the vote. The aftermath of the Great War. The transformative events and harsh realities of the year 1919 still reverberate a century later. Nineteen Nineteen, published to accompany a centennial exhibition of the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, explores the institution and its founding through the lens of this single, tumultuous year. The fully illustrated catalog features works from The Huntington’s vast collections of books, manuscripts, photographs, ephemera, and art, many of them never exhibited or published before. Highlights include German propaganda posters, labor manifestos, personal mementos from suffrage campaigns, firsthand chronicles of World War I and the papers of T.E. Lawrence (better known as “Lawrence of Arabia”). Artworks by Abraham Walkowitz, John Singer Sargent, Joseph Pennell, Earl Horter, and David Bomberg respond to the unsettling experience of modern life and to a postwar world desperately trying to piece its shards back together. James Glisson is the Interim Chief Curator of American Art at The Huntington. Jennifer A. Watts is Curator of Photography and Visual Culture at The Huntington. Karen R. Lawrence assumed her position as the ninth president of The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens on Sept. 1, 2018, following a decade as president at Sarah Lawrence, a small, highly regarded liberal arts college in Yonkers, New York.

Nineteen Nineteen

Lawrence, Karen R.

Watts, Jennifer A.

Glisson, James

Fascinating history of the Monterey Jazz Festival.

Monterey Jazz Festival

Reference

william-minor-clint-eastwood

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Early American decorative arts are showcased in The Huntington's Gail-Oxford Collection, which features paintings, sculpture, furniture, clocks, ceramics, metalwork, and textiles produced between the mid-17th century and the early 20th century. These objects were collected by Thomas Oxford and Victor Gail and bequeathed to The Huntington in 2016.

Abundant Harvest: Selections from the Gail-Oxford Collection of American Decorative Arts at The Huntington

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