Miriam Pawel on the history of the University of California

​Pulitzer Prize winner Miriam Pawel is back with a new book, California Dreams, an epic history of one of the world's elite public universities, its sweeping social impact, and hopeful lessons about endurance in troubled times.

The University has been at the nexus of nearly every public policy debate and social movement since the Civil War, from women's rights to student protests, from academic freedom to affirmative action, shaping policies that reverberate throughout the United States. Drawing on extensive research in ten archives and dozens of interviews, California Dreams weaves together the linked history of the school and state in all its drama, significance, and humanity; the result is a magisterial narrative of both a remarkable public institution of higher education, and also California itself.

​Pawel will be joined in conversation by Berkeleyside founder Frances Dinkelspiel, who is also the author of Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California, a New York Times bestseller, and Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California.