Peek in the Stacks

The Vahdah Olcott-Bickford Collection consists primarily of scores and correspondence, which may cause some of its smaller parts to go unnoticed by researchers. One of these interesting parts is a small series of lectures concentrating on the guitar's history, pedagogy, and even some of Vahdah's philosophy.  These lectures outline many of her ideas on music and the guitar...

Water history, particularly the controversy surrounding water rights and access, has dramatically and incontrovertibly shaped the growth and development of Los Angeles.  Nearly 100 years ago, the dedication and opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct on November 5, 1913 was the culmination of many years of work on the part of William Mulholland and others at Los Angeles' Department of Water and Power. More than any other ...

Agness Underwood was a Los Angeles newspaperwoman for forty-two years. During the 1930s and 1940s she was one of the city's best-known court and police reporters. In 1946, she became city editor of the Herald Express, a post she held for seventeen and a half years. No man had ever held the job more than four years. At the time she was the only female city editor of a major American metropolitan newspaper. During her ...

William Gaddis, born in Berkeley, California in 1920, was twelve years old when his father, a Captain in the US Navy, was posted to command a ship in the Far East.  The William Gaddis Collection consists of materials saved by Gaddis during the two years he spent living in China and the Philippines, and traveling around the region with his mother and sister while his father was at sea ...