Roundup: November 9, 2016

Almansor Court – 700 S. Almansor, Alhambra, CA.
Social Hour: 5:00 PM
Dinner: 6:00 PM

Our Speaker: Dr. Matthew A. Boxt
His Subject: The U.S. Naval Presence in Baja California, 1846-1909

This month’s presentation reviews the poorly remembered U.S. Navy’s presence in “the other” California during two historic episodes.  The Pacific Coast Campaign of the Mexican War (1846-1848) secured the Baja California Peninsula, which was subsequently returned to Mexico. Sixty years later, President Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, (1907-1909) put in at Magdalena Bay, Baja California, before moving on to San Francisco, and then across the Pacific.  Research for Dr. Boxt’s lecture incorporates online sources such as manuscripts, photographs, navigation logs, maps, postcards, and newspapers. Some of these materials are available for study at specific web sites, while others can only be accessed through purchase at electronic trading forums. Matthew will venture beyond the chronological and geographical dimensions of his subject in discussing how buying (or not buying) documentary material on the Internet may be changing the way we think about, and do, historical research.   

Matthew A. Boxt received a BA in Anthropology from UC Berkeley (1976) and his MA (1979) and Ph.D. (1993) from the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.  Boxt is a Fulbright Fellow (1986) and has conducted extensive archaeological fieldwork in Belize, Guatemala, Mexico, and California over the past forty years. Dr. Boxt has published numerous articles, monographs, and books on California and Mesoamerican archaeology.  In recent years he has served as a Guest Editor for the Pacific Coast Archaeological Society Quarterly, contributing original research articles about Alta and Baja California.  

Brian Dervin Dillon, Ph.D.
Deputy Sheriff