Michael Brescia, PhD: Head of Research, Curator of Ethnohistory, Arizona State Museum; Professor of History, University of Arizona
Thursday, November 7, 2024,
2:30pm – 4:30pm,
ASA Koffler Great Room and Zoom
With so much recent media attention given to book banning, censorship, and the social services provided by public libraries in the wake of the pandemic, civil strife, and political protests, scholars have been revisiting the function and scope of libraries in world history.
University of Arizona historian Michael Brescia examines the evolution of the venerable Biblioteca Palafoxiana, located in the city of Puebla, Mexico, and designated the very first public library in the Americas. Michael will discuss the library’s foundations in 1646, its role in colonial society, its entanglement with the secularization of Mexican politics in the nineteenth century, and, finally, how the library has responded to shifting political winds and natural disasters in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Dr. Michael Brescia is the Curator of Ethnohistory in the Arizona State Museum with faculty affiliations in the Department of History and the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona. He teaches a wide-range of courses including Mexican history, comparative history of North America, natural resources and the law in the Spanish borderlands, world history, and historical research methods. Michael is the co-author of two books that examine the broader historical forces that have shaped our continent from Pre-Columbian times to the present: the fourth edition of Mexico and the United States: Ambivalent Vistas (with W. Dirk Raat, University of Georgia Press, 2010), and North America: An Introduction (with John C. Super, University of Toronto Press, 2009). Dr. Brescia spend the fall semester 2023 as Visiting Research Scholar and Professor at Princeton University.
Compiled and edited by Rosemary Brown, Academy Village Volunteer
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