Kim Bancroft, author of Writing Themselves into History, delivers a lecture at The Chapel at Mission San Francisco Solano in Sonoma.

Kim Bancroft, the great-great-granddaughter of collector and historian Hubert Howe Bancroft (HHB), the founder of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, will focus on HHB’s complex relationship with General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. In 1876, HHB managed to get General Vallejo to dictate his own deep understanding of the history of California, from his own perspective as a Californio.
Vallejo’s life spanned the time from when Alta California was controlled by the Spaniards through his own military role in helping run the Mexican state to the Yanquis’ colonization. Vallejo and Bancroft were connected through their devotion of producing historical information, as well as their pride in their own roles in the state. However, they had different motivations in their collaboration. Their one-time friendship became twisted in the process.

The story of how they worked together and separately is very colorful in itself. Kim will provide a history of each man in brief and the nature of their collaboration, showing slides to illuminate the two men and their times.

Longtime teacher turned editor and writer, Kim Bancroft earned a B.A. in English from Stanford, an M.A. in English and a teaching credential from San Francisco State University, and a doctorate in education from UC Berkeley. She has taught at high schools and community colleges in the Bay Area, at the Universidad de Guanajuato in Mexico, and at Sacramento State. In 2014 Kim edited H.H.B.’s 1890 autobiography, Literary Industries, published by Heyday Books. She also wrote a biography of the founder of Heyday Books, called The Heyday of Malcolm Margolin: The Damn Good Times of a Fiercely Independent Publisher. Of many other memoirs that Kim has recently helped create, she has edited two of Native friends in the Willits area where she now lives in a cabin in the woods. Kim is also seeking to publish a book she wrote with a former classmate, David Waddell, called Same School, Different Class: A Dual Memoir of School Integration.