Part of the 2019 Windham-Campbell Festival: https://windhamcampbell.org
No places more fully epitomize twentieth and twenty-first century culture than Hollywood and Silicon Valley. In River of Shadows Rebecca Solnit explores the nineteenth century origins of modernity in the way that railroads, the telegraph, and photography transformed humanity’s experience of space and time and more specifically in the way that two Californians, Anglo-American huckster, murderer, and photographer Eadweard Muybridge and industrial tycoon Leland Stanford, collaborated to create the foundation of cinema and the University whose faculty and students helped build the computer industry. George Miles, curator of the Western Americana Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, joins Rebecca in a discussion of Muybridge and the revolution that he helped to initiate. A selection from the library’s Muybridge holdings will be on view.
George Miles is the William Robertson Coe Curator of the Yale Collection of Western Americana. He is co-author and editor of Eye on the West: Photography and the Contemporary West, Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, and Creating America and author of James Swan: Cha-tic of the Northwest Coast.