Fifty Years in the West: PCCBS 1974-2025

Some of the founders of the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, who migrated west in the Nixon era, may have been familiar with the NACBS mother ship or its eastern regional affiliates. Most were seeking collegiality, outside their colleges and departments, and wanted an occasion to discuss their research. Initiatives came together at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo in March 1974 for the first of now fifty meetings. Overnight accommodation was available at $4.50 a head in a room shared with four people. Over a hundred attended, to the delight and surprise of the convenors – the Australian historian Sam McCulloch from Irvine and the medievalist Warren Hollister from Santa Barbara. Sessions tilted toward the nineteenth century, but included a pioneering panel on “Writing Women’s History.” The printed program featured a unicorn rampant, replaced in later years by the lion passant, both evoking heraldry of the United Kingdom.

The PCCBS lion.

I missed that first meeting at San Luis Obispo, but I attended the next year at Santa Barbara, and most since. As an underpaid assistant professor in 1975, with no support from my small liberal arts college, I could not afford the conference hotel so I camped with my family at the nearby California State Beach. Unfortunately, it rained overnight and the site was flooded. I spoke at my first academic conference with wet clothes and no socks, though nobody seemed to notice or care. We were too busy discovering each other’s interests, sharing research reports, and learning to be professional historians, six thousand miles away from our principal archives.

Since its inception PCCBS has proved to be collegial, supportive, welcoming, and eclectic, with little deference to professorial rank or institutional status. Graduate students and beginning instructors have shared sessions with senior scholars and international celebrities from all parts of California and beyond. Historians have predominated, alongside literary scholars and occasional social scientists.

PCCBS has always met in springtime, when the Pacific Coast states are at their loveliest. An attendant pleasure has entailed long drives through wine and hill country, and along the actual Pacific coast. We have met as far south as San Diego and as far north as Victoria, after the Northwest Conference on British Studies merged with PCCBS in 2003. Officers have come from as far west as Honolulu and as far east as Las Vegas and Salt Lake City, from every sort of college and university.

Memorable moments include the 1985 presentation on “Morris Dancing and General Systems Theory,” with a demonstration of the Abbots Bromley horn dance; a session on the fiftieth anniversary of The Strange Death of Liberal England; the shock at Santa Cruz when a campus cat approached the podium and peed on the presenter’s briefcase; Ian Whitcomb’s band performing English Music Hall songs on the Queen Mary at Long Beach; and the plenary speaker who represented Charles I as the most merciful of kings, while the puritans who suffered mutilation and imprisonment for criticizing his church were lucky to escape execution. Several members recall with pleasure the ambience and generosity of the Huntington Library, and the support of its Directors of Research for British studies. The British Council and consuls in San Francisco and Los Angeles have sometimes contributed subventions.

A panoramic photograph of Ecola Point along the Pacific Coast in Oregon, 2021. Public domain image courtesy Jeff Hollett via flickr.

PCCBS programs since 1997 are available on our web site “archive” but those from the first quarter century were believed lost.  It’s a reminder of the evanescence of so much historical information, and the patchiness of what survives. Calls, emails, and even letters to PCCBS emeriti have unearthed a growing number of programs, with most valuable contributions from Tony Brundage of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and Mary Robertson of the Huntington.  Please help if you can (send to PCCBS website editor and archivist Molly McClain).

Reviewing past programs corrects and augments memory, and provides an opportunity to reflect on the profession and the field. Early meetings were dominated by political, institutional, and imperial history, with social, cultural, and religious history catching up.  More recent contributions have featured revisionism, gendered post-colonialism, and criticism of neoliberalism.

Plenary presentations progressed from “Cecil Rhodes: a Reappraisal” (John Galbraith) to “The Poor Law Amendment Act” (Derek Fraser), “The Origins of the English Civil War” (John Morrill), and “The First World War and British National Identity” (J. M. Winter). The 1990s opened with “Gendering Identity” (Lisa Jardine), and closed with “Gender, the Soul, and Religious Dissent in Early Modern Britain” (Phyllis Mack). Other highlights included “Ben Jonson and the Historians” (Blair Worden), “Britain’s Future Role in the European Community” (Shirley Williams), and “Cricket and English Society since 1600” (David Underdown).

Twenty-first century offerings began with “W. B. Yeats and the Irish Revolution” (Roy Foster) and “Central Government Interference, 1688-1840” (Joanna Innes). “Gender and Empire” (Phillipa Levine), “The Colonial Dilemma, Tropical Neurasthenia and the Alienated Briton” (Dane Kennedy), and “British Colonialism and African Women” (Marjorie McIntosh) represented the Imperial turn. More recent plenaries have included “Counterfactual Invasions in the British Imagination” (Catherine Gallagher), “The Right to Burial and the Crisis of the Old Regime” (Tom Laqueur), ‘Wealth, Finance and Urban Religious Dissent in Early Modern Scotland” (Margo Todd), and “The Settlement of the Poor in English Towns c. 1660-1730” (Naomi Tadmor). Eclectic indeed, but all interesting, entertaining, and solidly researched.

As has been remarked elsewhere, scholarship in British studies has energy and depth that colleagues elsewhere often overlook. Despite the diminished power and pretensions of post imperial Britain, the eclipse of British history in the American curriculum, and the loss of jobs in the field, the work keeps coming. Regional and national meetings of the Conference on British Studies fly the flag, but the wider world takes little notice. How many papers at the 2025 PCCBS at Stanford, I wonder, could be shared with a press release or more popular publicity?  Offerings include “Race, Slavery, and Patriarchy,” “Social Networks and Resilience,” “Free speech versus True Speech,” and the timely “Anti-Vaccinationism and the Gloucester Smallpox Epidemic.”

The conference has weathered turbulent times, with likely rough passages ahead. Covid caused the cancellation of the 2020 meeting, and none was held in 2021.  In-person gatherings are now on a biennial schedule, with virtual meetings in between. The disruption means that PCCBS marks if fiftieth meeting at Stanford in 2025, fifty-one years from its founding. It’s been a good ride, by no means over.

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David Cressy, author of a dozen books on early modern England, is George III Professor of British History emeritus at the Ohio State University, and Research Professor in Arts and Humanities at Claremont Graduate University.

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