CA History: How Small Towns Transformed California into an American Place

California is celebrating 175 years of statehood! Our guest will share how small towns transformed this place from “Feathered Kingdoms” to “Cities of Homes.”

Historian Kyle Livie, Ph.D. will explain the role of small towns and rural places in making California an American place. Over the past 175 years, people in California’s small towns—through campaigns, festivals, pageants, and parades—have built cultures that shaped our economy and ordered the world around them in complex ways, ways that continue to impact our ideas about the Golden State and its people today.

Learn more about this memory making and its lasting impact on our sense of place and understanding of California’s rich history.

About Kyle Lyvie:

Dr. Kyle Livie is Professor of History and Co-Director of the Lytton Center for History and the Public Good at Ohlone College.

Kyle’s research explores community development and cultural formation in California’s metropolitan spaces in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries resulting from transnational migration, with special interest paid to how migrant groups in small towns and rural places shaped shared identity, collective memory, and economic production.

This free event received funding support from the Friends of the Menlo Park Library.

Wednesday, September 10, 2025 | 06:00 PM - 07:00 PM
Menlo Park Library, 800 Alma St., Menlo Park, CA, 94025

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