The Huntington is among the nation’s most important centers for the study of the American West with an unsurpassed collection of materials that spans the full range of American western settlement, including the overland pioneer experience, the Gold Rush, and the development of Southern...

Alain Touwaide—historian of medicine, botany, and medicinal plants—compares the detailed account of natural history in the Florentine Codex and contemporary European herbal traditions. He suggests that they represent the opposition between unknown and known—a dynamic force that led to many...

Experience the inspiration behind Liu Fang Yuan, the Garden of Flowing Fragrance, in this 42-minute walking tour. The garden combines the beauty of nature with the expressiveness of literature to give deeper meaning to the landscape. Filled with literal and symbolic meanings, a walk through Liu...

This conference, sponsored by the Los Angeles Region Planning History Group, examines how the influence of amusement parks has gone beyond fun and money-making to shaping where and how Southern Californians live today.

A collection of Founder's Day Lectures throughout the years at The Huntingon.

Sujit Sivasundaram, director of the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge, discusses the historic gardens that existed in Sri Lanka before the arrival of the British and the changes they faced during the colonial period.

Susan Burns, professor of history at the University of Chicago, explores the incorporation of saffron into Japanese pharmacology, a complex process that involved the rise of natural science and a "productive confusion" that linked saffron with other botanicals.

Mary Sarah Bilder, Founders Professor at Boston College Law School, discusses the responses of George Washington and Benjamin Rush to Eliza Harriot O'Connor's remarkable university lectures in 1787 and their implications for female political status under the Constitution. O'Connor was the first...

Artists Soyoung Shin and Juliana Wisdom, two of the seven artists whose work is featured in the current exhibition COLLECTION/S, will discuss the influence of 18th-century French history and decorative arts on their work.

Sean Bradley, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington, explores the history and development of an early text on emergency Chinese medicine, the Zhouhou beiji fang 肘後備急方 (Emergency Medicines to Keep on Hand), by the 4th-century alchemist and scholar, Ge Hong 葛洪.

Phillip Bloom, The Huntington's new director of the Center for East Asian Garden Studies and curator of the Chinese Garden, examines the history of Shizhuanshan, a hilltop Buddhist sanctuary in southwestern China constructed in the late 11th century. Bloom argues that Shizhuanshan architecture,...

Experience the inspiration behind Liu Fang Yuan, the Garden of Flowering Fragrance, in this 42-minute walking tour. The garden combines the beauty of nature with the expressiveness of literature to give deeper meaning to the landscape. Filled with literal and symbolic meanings, a walk through Liu...

Author and political commentator Cokie Roberts discusses her new book Capital Dames, The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848-1868, which explores the lives of the women of Washington D.C. during the upheaval of the Civil War. Roberts has previously written about the vital female...

In celebration of the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's novel "Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus," scholars, scientists, writers, and directors discuss the profound issues—ethical, cultural, scientific, and beyond—raised by the novel from its publication in 1818 down to the early 21st...

Shigehisa Kuriyama, professor of cultural history at Harvard University, discusses the Inshoku yōjō kagami (Rules of Dietary Life), a Japanese woodblock print produced around 1850.

H.R. Woudhuysen, rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, talks about the market for old books and manuscripts in England in the time of the Tudors and Stuarts in this Zeidberg Lecture.

Richard Pegg, Asian art curator of the private MacLean Collection in Chicago, discusses the similarities and differences in representations of space, both real and imagined, in early modern maps created in China, Korea, and Japan. He also examines the introduction of European map-making...

Local historian Ann Scheid gives a fascinating lecture about this once-famous theme park, remnants of which can still be glimpsed around the neighborhood where it once stood. When German brewing magnate Adolphus Busch purchased a mansion on Pasadena's "Millionaires' Row" in 1904, he quickly...

Lugene Bruno, curator of Carnegie Mellon's Hunt Institute, and Alice Tangerini, curator of botanical art at the Smithsonian Institution, present an illustrated lecture on recently rediscovered artworks long forgotten in their archives. These botanical illustrations represent significant...

Authors Bryan Mealer and Joshua Wheeler discuss hardscrabble times, places, and people in Texas and New Mexico.

Markku Peltonen, professor of history at the University of Helsinki and the Fletcher Jones Foundation Distinguished Fellow, discusses why the famous philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) placed the blame for the English Civil War and Revolution of the 1640s at the door of schoolmasters. This talk...

Yong Chen, professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, discusses the historical forces that turned Chinese food, a cuisine once widely rejected by Americans, into one of the most popular ethnic foods in the U.S.

Glenn Webb, professor emeritus at Pepperdine University, discusses the globalization of the Japanese tea ceremony in the decades following World War II. Webb's lecture inaugurates the Dr. Genshitsu Sen Lecture Series, which focuses on Japanese tea culture.

Steven Usselman, historian and author, traces how the invention of the deep well centrifugal pump triggered a cascade of change that reshaped the Golden State.

The Huntington presents the Distinguished Fellow Lecture Series, featuring notable scholars from around the world.

Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University and the Rogers Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington, uses images shot by landscape photographer Jesse White to explore California's history.

Coinciding with the Huntington Library's exhibition in recognition of the 300th anniversary of the birth of Father Junípero Serra, this conference brings together an international group of scholars to explore larger contexts within which Serra lived and the various ways he has been represented...

To mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of the landmark folio “The Works of Ben Jonson,” experts in the field explore the English dramatist’s impact in his own time and his reputation down to the present. The conference was held at The Huntington Sept. 16–17, 2016.

This conference explores the shadowy realms of the Atlantic that connected four continents but also disrupted its various imperial structures. The participants will investigate important historical and historiographical questions about the nature of unlawful exchanges and the relationship between...

Paul Theroux, travel writer and novelist, explains how Jack London's experiences and observations in the Hawaiian Islands still resonate today, based on Theroux's own experiences and observation as a 30-year resident there.

William Deverell, professor of history at USC, explores the regional dimensions of American entrepreneurialism, asking what special features or challenges found in the American West helped drive entrepreneurs and stimulate original thinking?

The Los Angeles Region Planning History Group presents a symposium examining the Complete Streets movement. Speakers discuss how urban planners are exploring ways to recapture the public rights of way for pedestrians, bicycles, and public transit. The conference was held at The Huntington on...

Steven Shapin, the Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, discusses examples drawn from biology and contemporary art that contradict the widely held view that artistic productions are "things made up" and scientific knowledge consists of "things found...

Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, art historian and journalist, reveals the scholarship and science behind Project Blue Boy, The Huntington's two-year effort to conserve one of Western art's greatest masterpieces.

Joel A. Klein, the Molina Curator for the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences at The Huntington, explores the work of Daniel Sennert (1572–1637), professor of medicine at Wittenberg University, who sought to reform 17th-century medicine through alchemy, atomism, and experimentation. Sennert's...

Historian Daniela Bleichmar, co-curator of the exhibition "Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin," discusses the surprising and little-known story of the pivotal role that Latin America played in the pursuit of science and art during the first global era. This...

Kristen L. Chiem, associate professor of art history at Pepperdine University, explores the role of floral imagery in Qing-dynasty China.

Jennifer Van Horn, assistant professor at the University of Delaware, discusses the goods Anglo-Americans purchased and used in the 18th century, from dressing tables to portraits to peg legs.

Sally Gordon (University of Pennsylvania) and Kevin Waite (Durham University) explore the role of the Mormon Church and the spread of slavery across the continent in the mid-19th century through the life of Bridget "Biddy" Mason.

Jonathan Levy, associate professor of history at Princeton University, discusses the history of entrepreneurship as an idea, focusing upon the values that American entrepreneurs have shared and created from the early 20th century to today. This is part of the Haaga Lecture series at The Huntington.

Ari Kelman, winner of the Bancroft Prize for his book "A Misplaced Massacre", discusses the politics of memory surrounding one of the most notorious episodes of violence in the history of the American West. The talk took place on November 11, 2014, three weeks shy of the sesquicentennial...

Experience the inspiration behind Liu Fang Yuan, the Garden of Flowering Fragrance, in this 42-minute walking tour. The garden combines the beauty of nature with the expressiveness of literature to give deeper meaning to the landscape. Filled with literal and symbolic meanings, a walk through Liu...

Louis Warren, professor of U.S. Western History at the University of California, Davis, explores how Californians remade American ideas of property and power between 1848 and the present.

This symposium investigates the history of garden plant domestication in China, focusing on such topics as horticultural techniques, the origins and distribution of important species, and the knowledge gained from literary records to DNA analysis.

Eugene Wang, professor of art history at Harvard University, discusses the Qianlong Garden in the northeast corner of the Forbidden City. Built in the 1770s, the whole garden space can be seen as a five-act play.

The 22nd North American James Joyce Conference took place June 12–16, 2011, at The Huntington and Caltech, with a full slate of academic panels and several programs open to the public. The theme of the conference was “Joyce in Science and Art.” Notable public events included a reading and...

Author Icy Smith and illustrator Gayle Garner Roski discuss their book Mei Ling in China City, based on a true story set in Los Angeles during World War II.

Alexander Ji, Hubble Fellow at the Carnegie Observatories, leads a short tour of the early history of our Universe, offering intriguing glimpses of an epoch known as Cosmic Dawn, when the first stars and galaxies were born.

Tom Ford, fashion designer and filmmaker, discusses the making of his 2009 film, A Single Man, based on Christopher Isherwood's semi-autobiographical novel, published in 1964. Isherwood's archive, including the manuscript of the novel, is part of The Huntington's literary collections.

Chinese theater-maker Stan Lai (Lai Sheng-chuan 賴聲川) discusses the origins and evolution of Nightwalk in the Chinese Garden, his new, site-specific production for The Huntington. The play is the culmination of Lai's residency at The Huntington as the 2018 Cheng Family Visiting Artist and is...