Bancroft Library Roundtable Presentations will be held on the third Thursday of the month on Zoom, from 12:00-1:00, and are free and open to all. Note that the October talk will be held on the 4th Thursday of the month due to a scheduling conflict – it will be on October 23rd.
Dr. Sarah Gold McBride, a lecturer in the Interdisciplinary American Studies program here at Berkeley, will get us started on September 18th with:
Whiskerology: Finding the 19th-Century Culture of Hair in the Bancroft Collection
Sarah Gold McBride’s recent book, Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America (Harvard, 2025), began as a doctoral dissertation researched in part at The Bancroft Library. Bancroft’s collections of local municipal records and periodicals helped Gold McBride conceptualize the book’s central claim: Although hair is always and everywhere freighted with meaning, it took on decisive new significance in 19th-century America, as the young nation wrestled with its identity. In this presentation, Gold McBride will discuss some of the archival materials that vividly demonstrate the way hair indexed belonging two centuries ago.
Register via Zoom
Feel free to forward this to anyone who may be interested. The more the merrier!