History
The Gaskell Ball is named for the British writer Elizabeth Gaskell. The Gaskell Ball originated in 1979, when the troupe playing the Gaskell family at the Charles Dickens Fair decided to hold a ball in her honor. The first ball was held at Mills College, a women's college in Oakland. In proceeding years it was held at the Veterans' Auditorium in Oakland. In the 1990s the ball outgrew the hall and had to be moved to accommodate the 300-500 visitors that now attend. The Christmas Ball is still one of the most popular events.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
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“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
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