17 April 2026 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

DC Jackson (Lafayette College)

“John R. Freeman: The Man Who Dammed Hetch Hetchy”

In December 1913, the US Congress and President Woodrow Wilson authorized the City of San Francisco to build a massive municipal water supply dam in the northern reaches of Yosemite National Park. This approval came after a decade long struggle in which preservationists led by John Muir fought to protect Hetch Hetchy from inundation and created what William Cronon has termed “the single most famous episode in American conservation history.” Usually framed as a battle between Muir and the renowned conservationist Gifford Pinchot (who amazingly never visited the valley), the story of the Hetch Hetchy controversy has long been told from a preservationist perspective, one that provides remarkably little insight into how, in the face of intense opposition, the city proved successful in winning the right to build a dam in the park. In my book The Man Who Dammed Hetch Hetchy, the focus shifts to the work of the East Coast consulting engineer John R. Freeman, explaining his origins as a hydraulic engineer, the nature of his engagement with San Francisco, and the professional experiences that underlay his creation of a 421-page report that detailed a dam and aqueduct capable of delivering 400 million gallons of water per day to the Bay Area. Upon completion of his Hetch Hetchy report in the late summer of 1912, Freeman then became a key political advocate and lobbyist for the city, operating in the corridors of power in Washington, D.C., to promote the city’s cause. Beyond exploring the complexity of Freeman’s work as a Progressive Era consulting engineer, the seminar will provide an opportunity to discuss the political nature of engineering and the forces that created the hydraulic infrastructure of the modern American West.

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DC Jackson is the Cornelia F. Hugel Professor of History at Lafayette College. He holds a Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. in Engineering from Swarthmore College. He has had a long-standing interest in the history of water in the American West and his book Heavy Ground: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster (co-authored with the late Norris Hundley jr.) was awarded the Society for the History of Technology’s Sally Hacker Prize in 2017.

3 April 2026 – 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

Nic John Ramos (American Studies) 

“A Tale of Two Clinics: Bringing the History of Anti-Poverty Clinics into the History of Community Mental Health Clinics”

This paper approaches the modern federally-funded U.S. neighborhood health clinic as not only a technology designed to distribute health services more efficiently to formerly-excluded patient populations after 1965 but also to distribute those services in ways that would eventually produce citizens who consumed health services on the same terms of their previous exclusion. By examining two different health clinics built as a response to the 1965 Watts Uprisings, this paper unearths the shared discourses of respectable marriage and family, consumerism, and individual responsibility that unify two movements usually discussed in isolation from each other (the community health movement and the community mental health movement); and two movements usually discussed in mainstream conversations about race as being in contention with each other (the civil rights movement and the Black power movement). In so doing, the paper reveals that the goal of the clinics built in Watts was not to eradicate sickness or poverty per se, but to produce individuals who desired work and normative family lives independent from state assistance as signs of being “normal” and “healthy.”

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Nic John Ramos is an Assistant Professor in the UT Department of American Studies and the Center for Asian American Studies. He holds a Master’s and Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California and earned a dual-degree in Asian American Studies and Political Science with a minor in African American Studies from the University of California at Irvine. He has previously held appointments in the Department of History and the Program in Africana Studies at Drexel University; in the Department of Africana Studies, the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow of Race in Science and Medicine at Brown University, and served as a Ford Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program in Race, Science, and Society at the University of Pennsylvania. His talk today is a part of his book, Health as Property: Racial Capitalism and Sexual Liberalism in Los Angeles, which is available for a 40% discount at UCPress.edu if you use the code AUTHOR40 at checkout.