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.
Read more about this topic: The Gaskell Ball
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)