Revisit The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West’s online exhibition of images from the Southern California Edison archive.
Lectures
Join us as we revisit Form & Landscape, an online photographic exhibition of The Huntington’s Southern California Edison archive, as part of ICW’s 20th-anniversary Considering Anew series. The Southern California Edison archive holds a jaw-dropping array of 70,000 images, dating from the late 19th century through the early 1970s. The archive documents dozens of Edison projects, as well as employee gatherings, streetscapes, billboards, agricultural and other industries, exhibitions, small businesses, sports and recreational facilities, electrical appliances, education and promotional efforts, advertisements, suburban development, and a host of other topics. In short, the archive offers a 20th-century vision of better living through electrification.
About the Speakers
Jared Farmer is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Originally from Utah, he earned his Ph.D. at Stanford and served as the inaugural postdoctoral fellow at The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. He is the author of four books, including Trees in Paradise: A California History (2013) and Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees (2022).
Hillary Jenks, co-executive director of the Inland Empire Labor Institute, is a leader with over 15 years of dedicated experience in managing complex organizations and serving diverse stakeholders in the fields of education and workforce development. Previously she directed professional development programs for over 3,500 graduate students at the University of California, Riverside; led the Center for Social Justice and Civil Liberties for the Riverside Community College District; and taught at Portland State University. She received her Ph.D. from USC.
D. J. Waldie is a cultural historian, memoirist, and translator who is best known for Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. He is the author of Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles and Becoming Los Angeles: Myth, Memory, and a Sense of Place. In 2021, The New Yorker called him “one of the most respected contemporary voices on life in Southern California.”