Events Fall-Spring 2026-27
Exploring the Community theme through our HSSC programming calendar for the 2026–2027 season.
This year’s theme for the Historical Society of Southern California is “Community”: a word that is both familiar and deeply contested, especially in a region as vast, diverse, and complex as Southern California.
To speak of community in Southern California is to speak of place, memory, struggle, belonging, and responsibility. It is to ask how people come together across neighborhoods, languages, histories, and identities. It is also to ask who has been included, who has been pushed aside, and who has had to create community in the face of exclusion, displacement, and harm.Southern California has never been one single story. It is made up of many communities, layered across land, culture, migration, labor, faith, family, resistance, and imagination. Some communities are rooted in long histories of place. Others are formed through movement, necessity, survival, and shared hope. Some are visible in institutions and public memory, while others have been sustained quietly through mutual aid, storytelling, caregiving, activism, and everyday acts of connection.This year’s theme invites us to think about community not as something simple or sentimental, but as something living. Community is built through care, but it is also tested by inequality, fire, policing, housing insecurity, environmental crisis, racism, displacement, and political neglect. It can be a source of protection and belonging, but it can also reveal the boundaries of power: who is allowed to belong, who is asked to assimilate, and who must fight to be seen.True to our mission, the Historical Society remains committed to “uplifting underrepresented voices, empowering community partners to tell their own stories, and creating an inclusive narrative about the history of Southern California and the West—a narrative that embraces both agency and anguish.” A focus on community allows us to deepen that mission by listening closely to the people, places, and histories that have shaped this region from the ground up.The 2026–2027 theme asks us to reflect on community as something made and remade through history. It is not only a place we inherit, but a relationship we practice. It is found in neighborhoods, archives, movements, families, schools, churches, cultural spaces, labor struggles, and acts of collective memory. It is found wherever people gather to preserve the past, confront the present, and imagine a more just future.Together, we will explore what community has meant, what it means now, and what it might still become in Southern California.
Daniel B. Lynch holds a PhD in U.S. history from UCLA and specializes in the history of Southern California. He is a board member of the Historical Society of Southern California and the author of the new book Dancing with Manifest Destiny: Elite Men of Color and the Making of American Los Angeles (University of Oklahoma Press, 2026). His work has also appeared in Zócalo Public Square, California History, the Western Historical Quarterly, and several edited volumes. Lynch has taught history for more than twenty years and currently teaches Los Angeles history and Honors Research at Marlborough School in Los Angeles.
Dancing with Manifest Destiny
Elite Men of Color and the Making of American Los Angeles
by Daniel B. Lynch
From the Mexican American War and through the Civil War Era, Mexican and US social hierarchies collided in Southern California, transforming the character of Los Angeles from Mexican-Californian to "American." Influencing this transition in unexpected ways were three men of color: a Californio general turned legislator; a formerly enslaved barber; and a Mexico City-born politician and historian. In Dancing with Manifest Destiny: Elite Men of Color and the Making of American Los Angeles, Daniel B. Lynch reveals how these men—Andrés Pico, Peter Biggs, and Antonio Francisco Coronel—helped shape early Los Angeles by strategically embracing and creatively amplifying the racial and masculine ideals of white settler colonialism.
Though not white Americans themselves, Pico, Biggs, and Coronel endorsed American-style white supremacy while leveraging elements of their own backgrounds that set them apart from and, in some ways, above white settlers. Lynch describes how this allowed them to establish commanding presences in three overlapping arenas: the equestrian culture of militias and vigilantism; the social world of the barbershop and demimonde; and the ideological realm of historical imagination in a layered colonial city on its way to becoming a major metropolis. While the interests of white men remained paramount in the ascendant settler city, there was room for a few elite men of color—men who did not fit the settler mold yet nonetheless represented a frontier masculinity uniquely suited to Southern California's distinctive diversity.
Dancing with Manifest Destiny deftly documents how Pico, Biggs, and Coronel, standing center stage in frontier Los Angeles, maintained a surprising degree of influence amidst extremely hostile circumstances—at least for a while. The book recovers a forgotten layer in the origin story of Los Angeles, even as it offers fresh insight into entanglements of race, masculinity, and politics that persist to this day.
October 2026: Author Spotlight Dancing with Manifest Destiny: Elite Men of Color and the Making of American Los Angeles Author: Dr. Dan Lynch October, 12, 2026 | 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM | via Zoom
Join us for an evening with Dr. Dan Lynch as he discusses how three men of color: Andrés Pico, Peter Biggs, and Antonio Francisco Coronel, helped shape Los Angeles during its transition from a Mexican Californian city to an American one. Drawing on his new book, Lynch explores the complicated roles of race, power, and identity in the city’s early history.
November 2026: Author Spotlight The Boundless Biddy Mason: An Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom Across the American West Author: Dr. Kevin Waite November, 19, 2026 | 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM | via Zoom
Join us for an evening with historian Kevin Waite as he explores Biddy Mason’s journey from enslavement to freedom and the people who helped make freedom possible in Southern California. Drawing on his new biography, Waite will discuss how Mason became a healer, philanthropist, and founder of Black Los Angeles.
The Boundless Biddy Mason:
An Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom Across the American West
by Kevin Waite
How Biddy Mason crossed the continent, broke free from slavery, and built Black Los Angeles.
Born in bondage, Biddy Mason endured one of the longest forced migrations in American history—three thousand miles on foot from Georgia to California. She and her daughters labored in slavery in the “free” state of California for five years before launching a landmark emancipation suit in 1856. Free at last, she defied barriers of race and gender, rising to prominence as a healer, philanthropist, church builder, and real estate entrepreneur whose commercial properties stood at what became known as the “Wall Street of the West.” By the time of her death in 1891, she had laid the foundations of Black Los Angeles and ranked among the richest women of color in the United States.
In this first book-length biography of Mason, prizewinning historian Kevin Waite uncovers an extraordinary story of survival that carries readers from the cotton South to metropolitan California, and through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the dawn of Jim Crow. By retracing Mason’s odyssey, he illuminates both the continental sweep of American slavery and the fragile, hard-won possibilities of freedom in the West.
Link to the book, preorder with author signature by
October 25, 2026:
Kevin Waite is Anne Stark Watson and Chester Watson Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Texas at Dallas. His first book, West of Slavery, won the 2022 Wiley-Silver Prize and was shortlisted for three other awards, including the Lincoln Prize. His writing appears in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Slate, National Geographic, and The New Republic. Kevin moonlights in the TV and film industry, most recently as the writer and producer of a six-episode docuseries on the American Revolution for National Geographic and Disney+.
Link to the book, preorder with author signature after
October 25, 2026:
Contact the Historical Society of Southern California
Contact The Historical Society of Southern California welcomes your questions, comments, suggestions, compliments, and complaints as a way to continuously improve our services to you.The HSSC no longer has an archival collection. We are no longer accepting any donations of any archival material.The HSSC has suspended sponsoring or hosting any events as the organization focuses on supporting the publication of the Southern California Quarterly.Contact Information: HSSC Mailing Address: 5737 Kanan Road, Suite 656 Agoura Hills, CA 91301 323-222-0546 hssc@thehssc.org
THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA • SINCE 1883 • EDUCATING LOCAL AND GLOBAL COMMUNITIES • PRESERVING HISTORY • ARCHIVING OUR PAST •