The Pacific Coast Branch
The 99th annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association, took place at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, August 3–5, 2006. The history department of Stanford University sponsored the meeting. Albert Camarillo (Stanford Univ.) served as PCB president in 2006. Becky Nicolaides (Univ. of California at San Diego) and Pedro Castillo (Univ. of California at Santa Cruz) co-chaired the program committee. David Igler (Univ. of California at Irvine) chaired the nominations committee.
The conference had 239 registered participants. The program featured 50 different sessions, with an especially strong showing in community, urban, and suburban histories, post-World War II histories of the U.S. west, and Mexican history. Susan Groag Bell, senior scholar at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University, addressed the luncheon of the Western Association of Women Historians on the topic, “Christine de Pizan (1364–1430) in Her Study.”
The winners of the various PCB awards and prizes were as follows: the Pacific Coast Branch Book Award went to Julia L. Mickenberg for Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (Oxford Univ. Press); the Norris and Carol Hundley Award to Steve Estes for I Am a Man: Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (Univ. of North Carolina Press); and the W. Turrentine Jackson (Dissertation) Award to Rachel St. John, Stanford University, for “Line in the Sand: The Desert Border Between the United States and Mexico, 1948-1934. The Louis Knott Koontz Memorial Award for the best article published the previous year in the Pacific Historical Review was awarded to Dara Orenstein (Yale Univ.), for “Void for Vagueness: Mexicans and the Collapse of Miscegnation Law in California”; and the W. Turrentine Jackson Prize, for the best article by a graduate student published in the Pacific Historical Review went to Gretchen Heefner, Yale University, for “‘A Symbol of the New Frontier’: Hawaiian Statehood, Anti-Colonialism, and Winning the Cold War.” All Pacific Coast Branch prizes carry with them a cash stipend of $750 and a framed certificate for the recipient.
The president-elect of the PCB for 2008 is David Wrobel (Univ. of Nevada at Las Vegas). Newly elected members of the PCB Council are Samuel Truett (Univ. of New Mexico), Colleen O’Neill (Utah State Univ.), and Beshara Doumani (Univ. of California at Berkeley) while Cheryl Koos (California State Univ. at Los Angeles), Erika Bsumek (Univ. of Texas at Austin), and Jared Orsi (Colorado State Univ.), were elected to be on the Nominating Committee. The PCB is grateful to candidates who, although unsuccessful in the balloting, graciously consented to stand for office. These included Terrence M. Cole (Univ. of Alaska at Fairbanks), Elizabeth Dennison (Univ. of Alaska at Anchorage), David Anthony III (Univ. of California at Santa Cruz), Roxanne Easley (Central Washington Univ.), Mary Ann Villarreal (Univ. of Utah), and Matthew C. Whitaker (Arizona State Univ.).
President-elect 2007 Linda B. Hall, University of New Mexico, announced her committee appointments: Elizabeth Jameson (Univ. of Calgary), to the Jackson (Dissertation) Prize Committee; John M. Hart (Univ. of Houston), to the Norris Award Committee; Jeremy Mouat (Univ.of Alberta), to the PCB Book Award Committee; and Robin Walz (Univ. of Alaska Southeast) as chair of the Nominations Committee.
Janet Farrell Brodie
