Department are very happy to be presenting a talk by steve, professor of history at florida university. The university. He works and teaches on environmental history, history of capitalism, agrarian studies and other topics interest objectsubjects. Hes a writer of other works including the lean earth soil Anand Society in 19th century 1y america, the great delusion, a mad inventor stuck in the tropics into the utopian origins of economic growth. Tonight, hes going to be talking to us about his new book that will be released on november 21, just in time for the holidays, so please mark your calendars. The book is of course the ordeal of appalachia as you can see by the picture of its lovely cover. And i am excited about the talk and thrilled to have him with us at the new school. Theres been a lot of talk obviously about the places left behind, the sort of poor rural communitiecommunity, the white s who voted for trump, you know, and th they sense that the Historical Context of the post
Themselves occasionally. He be the basic story was saw miners Walking Around San Francisco at the raggedy pants, and ripping through their pockets, and he decided to make a pair of pants out of campus and that he later died them blue or got the fabric from friends, depending on who wrote the story, and then later, he puts rivets in them and cut off and jeans. They were i realized these stories had been made up. Guess who made them a question mark company. Bless their little pointed heads. They really tried. They really tried to tell the early history but they didnt have anything to work with. The time ofs arose world war ii, when there was a lot of competition in the denim world and they needed a powerful origin story and they made assumptions based on what they had and we were left with 1850 clip or ship ripped pockets denim from france. Although i have to say my very favorite story about the origin of the company was the linden sunday times, which said the company was founded by the
Lynn downey, welcome. [applause] thank you, adam. Worked at the California Historical society and its always fun to be back wherever they happen to be. Going to spend a little time tonight talking about the man i have spent over 25 years of my life with and hopefully by the into of the evening, you will understand why. I was hired as the first historian archivist in 1989. When i walked down the door, i was not too surprised that there werent any Historical Records because of this. This is a picture of the Company Headquarters april 20, 1906, after the building had survived the massive earthquake, but not the fire. It is not unusual. You are for a company in San Francisco that was founded before the earthquake, you are not going to have much. But i did not understand the impact it would have on my work. So im the first historian archivist ever hired. So it was really important for me to get up and running and understand history right away. So i started reading published histories of the