Three organizations helping to explore the story of California and the American West
This contemporary peace accord is not among political parties, ethnic groups or water rights claimants who have squabbled in the region's past.
Instead it involves three highly regarded -- and relatively new -- academic institutes cooperating to advance the study of a legacy stretching from before the 16th century forays of Spanish conquistadors into New Mexico through this spring's massive rallies in Los Angeles for immigrant rights.
The effort, which formally kicks off today with a jointly sponsored workshop for graduate students, could help Western American history overcome a reputation in some circles as being less significant than the East Coast's or Europe's, experts say. And it aims to shake off many Southern Californians' perception that history happens someplace else.
"There's a constant theme in thinking about Los Angeles: that history ends here, that history stopped here, that history doesn't exist here. Mostly nonsense, nonsense, nonsense," USC history professor William Deverell said.
Deverell is director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, a 2-year-old organization that links the archival treasures of the Huntington Library in San Marino with USC's faculty and students.
Today his institute will co-sponsor the workshop for doctoral scholars along with Stanford University's Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West, a think tank founded in 2002, and the Autry National Center's 4-year-old Institute for the Study of the American West.
The centers' relative youth and their unusual internal and external alliances are evidence that "academically speaking, California studies are no longer considered a provincial sideshow," said Kevin Starr, the USC professor and state librarian emeritus who is considered by many to be the most prominent California historian today.
The history of California and the West, of course, is not a peaceable saga, spiked as it is with land grabs, labor strife, massacres and even cannibalism.
And that doesn't include the occasionally nasty arguments among historians who chronicle and interpret the region's past.