In the 1960s, a small team of innovators gathered on a stunning sweep of land overlooking the California coast. They envisioned a new and different kind of university—one that could reinvent public higher education in the United States. Through this oral history of the University of California, Santa Cruz, we hear first-person accounts of the campus’s evolution, from the origins of an audacious dream through the sea changes of five decades. More than two hundred narrators and a trove of archival images contribute to this dynamic, nuanced account. Today, UC Santa Cruz is a leading research university with experimental roots. This is the story of what was learned, what was lost, and what has grown along the way.

The photos, oral history clips, videos, posters, and other archival objects featured in this digital exhibit supplement the printed book Seeds of Something Different: An Oral History of the University of California, Santa Cruz, edited and published by the UCSC Library's Regional History Project. This site also serves as a gateway to the rich archival collections available to the interested researcher at the Library's Special Collections & Archives and beyond. The site includes a link through which those who want to contribute stories, photos, and other archival material documenting UCSC's history may submit those materials for curation.

The typical Grateful Dead show was a tale of two economies.

On one side of things is the massive corporate entertainment machinery needed to put on multi-night concerts for tens of thousands of people, with large stage crews, concert promoters, sports arena venues, record labels, radio, official merchandise and of course the band themselves.

On the other side of the venue walls was the parking lot scene: the social, cultural and economic hub of the legions of Deadheads who followed the band from concert to concert.

A Touch Of Greymarket: Capitalism at the Grateful Dead Show is a 360 degree tour of the complicated economic world of live concerts, both in and around the concert itself. It gives online viewers (and listeners) another way to explore the exhibition "Put Your Gold Money Where Your Love, Baby": Counterculture, Capitalism, and the Grateful Dead, curated by Jessica Pigza, Alix Norton and Gabriel Saloman Mindel, and on view at Dead Central from June 2018 - May 2019.

Click on icons to discover photos, live recordings, and letters from Deadheads and bandmembers alike, all housed within the Grateful Dead Archive at UCSC McHenry Library's Special Collections.

This year, the Center for Archival Research and Training (CART) fellows processed four collections from the University Archives: the Raymond F. Dasmann papers, the Shakespeare Santa Cruz records, the records of the Feminist Studies Department at UCSC, and the UCSC Women of Color Research Cluster records. While we were organizing these records and making them available for research, questions about institutional engagement began to emerge: 

What makes a "public" university? Whom does a public university serve?

In exploring these questions, we considered the influence of these archives across three spheres of public dialogue: the university community, the city of Santa Cruz and state of California, and across the globe. In influencing these communities, the university also transformed itself.

This exhibit highlights the contributions these people and organizations made to the university and beyond, and shows ways in which they innovated in their own communities of practice, engaging UCSC students, faculty, and staff along the way.

Click on the links below to enter the digital exhibit for each archival collection.

Ray Dasmann	Women of Color Research Cluster	Shakespeare Santa Cruz

"TURN ON, TUNE IN, DROP OUT"

Approximately 75,000 young people converged in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco in the summer of 1967. Drawn to the area by a shared rejection of dominant American morals and cultural values, these “hippies” sought to manifest a new mode of authentic living by dropping out of society.

Several social and cultural factors made the Summer of Love possible. Fueled by a mistrust of government, a disdain for materialism and censorship, and empowered to challnege societal prejudices, young people flocked to the Haight and embraced Timothy Leary’s call to "turn on, tune in, drop out."

THE HIPPIE PHENOMENON

Mainstream media coverage of the “hippie phenomenon” portrayed a menacing, yet enticing lifestyle of excess that attracted more high school and college students from around the country to experience the free love movement. While it was a short-lived phenomenon, the Summer of Love produced lasting cultural legacies, including that of the Grateful Dead which has endured for half a century.

REPRESENTATION: CRAFTING the SUMMER OF LOVE

This online exhibit focuses on the different modes of representation that translated and transformed the Summer of Love from a hippie movement in San Francisco to a nation-wide spectacle and invited young people to the Haight. Materials include mainstream and underground media articles that spread the word about life on the Haight, Beat poetry and small press publications that elevated the langauge of the hippie, and broadsides that activated the youth population to confront political and societal norms.

MORE in DEAD CENTRAL

Visit Dead Central at McHenry Library to learn more and see primary materials from the UCSC Special Collections & Archives that document daily life in the Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love. Love on Haight will be open in Dead Central from June 6, 2017-May 1, 2018.

Beginning in 1986, the City of Santa Cruz rose to the forefront of growing citizen opposition to offshore oil drilling in California. A coalition of elected officials, including city councilmembers, John Laird and Mardi Wormhoudt, county supervisor and land use lawyer, Gary Patton, and chair of Save our Shores, Kim Tschantz, developed an innovative oppositional strategy. The federal govern­ment holds jurisdiction over offshore leasing areas located between three and two hundred miles off the coast of California. Oil drilling is constitutionally protected as a federal activity. In other words, local communities have no legal standing to oppose oil drilling off their coasts. However, oil drilling does necessitate the construction of a supporting onshore infrastructure, including dewatering plants, heli­copter pads, and pipelines, and these facilities must be approved by local zoning changes. This coalition introduced Measure A, a ballot measure that mandated that any of these zoning changes would have to be approved by a vote of the people of the City of Santa Cruz. The measure passed with 82 percent of the vote. Perhaps most importantly, it also authorized the Santa Cruz City Council to provide funds to lead a fight against offshore oil in Central and Northern California.

As a result of Measure A, Santa Cruz activist and UCSC alum Dan Haifley was hired (through Save Our Shores) to coordinate what became known as the Oil Information Program. In the late 1980s, Haifley traveled in his Pinto throughout Coastal California communities showing an educational slideshow he developed entitled Is It Worth the Risk? and consulting via telephone and in person with local government officials and activists interested in passing land use ordinances modeled on the ballot measure that passed in Santa Cruz. Over twenty of such ordinances passed throughout California.

Then the oil industry fought back. The Western Oil and Gas Association (later named the Western States Oil and Gas Association) sued thirteen of the communities involved. The communities pooled their resources and hired attorney Roger Beers in San Francisco, who successfully won the case for local governments. This sent a strong political message to Washington, D.C. regard­ing citizen opposition to offshore oil drilling in California, a political message which played an essential role in the next chap­ter of the battle against offshore oil drilling in California, which was the establishment of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary (MBMNS). Haifley was to be integrally involved in this battle as well.

In 1972, Congress had passed the Marine Protection, Research and Sanctuaries Act which, among other things, established the National Marine Sanctuary Program. Title III of the law was later renamed the National Marine Sanctuaries Act. Efforts to cre­ate a marine sanctuary in the Monterey Bay region date back to 1975, when the California Coastal Zone Conservation Commission recommended a sanctuary for the area, but after many years that proposal was eventually rejected by the Reagan administration. This proposal was reintroduced by Congressman Leon Panetta in 1988 and eventually evolved into the 1992 federal designation of a much larger sanctuary, which stretches 276 miles from Cambria in the south to Marin County in the north.

According to the MBMNS website, the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary’s resources include “. . . our nation’s larg­est kelp forest, one of North America’s largest underwater canyons and the closest-to-shore deep ocean environment in the continental United States. It is home to one of the most diverse marine eco­systems in the world, including 33 species of marine mammals, 94 species of seabirds, 345 species of fishes, and numerous invertebrates and plants. It is considered by many as the “Serengeti of the Sea.”

Jean H. Langenheim is a distinguished ecologist and educator who has performed interdisciplinary research in the fields of plant ecology, paleobotany, and ethnobotany. The first woman to be promoted to full professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, Langenheim was also the first female faculty member in the natural sciences at UCSC, and served as a pioneering woman leader in a variety of scientific organizations.

For more biographical informaiton, see Langenheim's 2010 memoir, The Odyssey of a Woman Field Scientist: A Story of Passion, Persistence, and Patience. In addition, Langenheim's biobibliography includes a full listing of her academic history, publications, professional activity, and more: Jean H. Langenheim biobibliography.

This exhibit features images from the Jean H. Langenheim Papers at the UCSC Library Special Collections & Archives, and was created in celebration of Langenheim's 90th birthday in September of 2015.

During the 2015 winter quarter, students from the senior seminar on the “art of the medieval book” organized, prepared and installed both a physical and online exhibit. The class was held in McHenry Library’s Special Collections and taught by Elisabeth Remak-Honnef. The items on exhibit, selected from Special Collections, provide a glimpse of what the students learned throughout the quarter: a survey of about a thousand years of the evolution of book production and use in Europe. Concentrating primarily on medieval illuminated manuscripts, the class looked at different types of books to examine not only how they were made, for whom they were made, how they were used and how and why they were decorated, but also how they have survived.  As part of their coursework, students wrote descriptive captions for the items on display as well as longer essays on single manuscripts. Students also selected a 20^th or 21^st century artists’ book to compare with their medieval manuscript and prepared short reports on such aspects of book production as parchment preparation, pigments and gilding, scripts and paleography, writing materials and binding techniques.

Artists and their Books: Medieval and Modern examples from Special Collections focuses on the circumstances under which the books were produced and first used. How were they intended to be used and by whom? What is the relationship between text and image in each of the books, and how does the page layout inform the way a reader looks or looked at the page?

The cases contain facsimiles of eight medieval illuminated manuscripts grouped primarily by subject matter and function: religious books, secular books, model books, and alphabet books - including the library’s most recent acquisition, a one-of-a kind artists’ book by San Francisco calligrapher Thomas Ingmire entitled Finnegan’s Facebook.

The installation of both the physical and digital exhibits took the place of a final exam and I think that you will agree that the students listed below passed with flying colors!

Natalie Black (Botanical illustration)

George Droulia (Psalter)

Gabriela Espinal (Crusades)

Matthew Kim (Apocalypse)

Blake Laughter (Legends from Antiquity)

Kelsey Lewis (Haggadah)

Dominique Lindsay (Pattern and Alphabet Books)

Logan McDowell (Dante)