This multi-media program is a reenactment of a radio show on the occasion of the opening of Brandeis University. Elizabeth and Susan Brandeis will be sharing the long-lasting contributions of their father, Justice Louis D. Brandeis, to the legal system and social reform. Brandeis was the first Jewish supreme court justice of the United States. Family photos and other pictures will be shown on a screen. Many of the issues relevant one hundred years ago are still relevant today.
You are invited to be part of the studio audience.

Connie Korenstein (Susan Brandeis)

Connie moved from the East coast to California to begin her career as a teacher in both Los Angeles and Oxnard. Since her retirement Connie has dedicated her energies to writing and presenting living history programs and participating in community events. She recently received a grant from the city of Oxnard for her endeavors. Connie is also an expert on vintage fashions. She is a docent at Heritage Square, the Channel Islands Maritime Museum in Oxnard, and the Dudley House in Ventura. Besides Susan Brandeis, she portrays a variety of historic women including Lucy Levy, a local pioneer, Carrie Jacobs Bond, song writer and publisher, Sarah Joseph Hale, the Godmother of Thanksgiving, and pioneer women in Victorian fashion shows.

Diane Mautner (Elizabeth Brandeis)

Diane also moved from the East coast to California. She attended the Timber School in the Thousand Oaks area for a short time, before moving to Los Angeles. Diane began her career as a teacher. She married Ray Mautner, a music teacher, who participates in many shows on keyboard. Their three daughters are also musicians, and the grandkids play a variety of instruments. Diane returned to the university and earned a masters degree in Communicative Disorders.
Thereafter she worked in both Los Angeles and Ventura Counties as a speech pathologist. Since her retirement, Diane devotes most of her energies to writing. She is the author of three children’s books and is currently working on a collection of biographies based on travels with Ray to all fifty states. Diane has written scripts for some of the living history shows, which are performed with Connie, Ray and cast of characters called the Heritage Harmony Players. She has written curriculum for the Los Angeles City Schools and The Disney Language Learning Schools in Shanghai, China. Diane has also written two workbooks for the Cartoon Network. Diane is a docent at Heritage Square in Oxnard, a member of the Brandeis National Committee, and member of The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. She is also a fan of Downton Abbey. In her spare time Diane enjoys baking, hiking, sewing, playing the piano and folk guitar, and enjoying her seven grandchildren.

Dr. Buschman’s talk will provide an overview of the last few months of the First World War as well as its global consequences.

Most of us learned that on November 11, 1918, Germany signed an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railroad car outside Compiégne, France. If you have always wanted to discover more about the War to End all Wars, Dr. Rainer F. Buschmann is your man. Not only do his students rave about his ability to make history come alive, but Dr. Buschmann team-teaches a WWI history course at California State University, Channel Islands.

Dr. Buschmann is professor and founding faculty member in the history program at the California State University Channel Islands. He formerly taught at both Hawaii Pacific University and Purdue University.

Buschmann’s research and teaching explores the oceanic dimensions of European expansion and has resulted in five books: Oceans in World History (2007), Anthropology’s Global Histories: The Ethnographic Frontier in German New Guinea, 1870-1935 (2009), Iberian Visions of the Pacific Ocean, 1507-1899 (2014), (with Ed Slack and Jim Tueller) Navigating the Spanish Lake: The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521-1898 (2014), and (with Lance Nolde) The World’s Oceans: Geography History, and Environment (2018). He also edits the world history section of the History Compass and is co-editor of a new book series entitled Nebraska Studies in Pacific World.

Even a decade ago, if you owned a late model car and resided in the western half of Ventura County, you might have felt the urge to gun the engine, hold your breath, and pray that your vehicle would make it up the whopping seven percent Conejo Grade.

Further north, you may have also found yourself journeying up and down the so- called Norwegian Grade. What you may not have realized about what is now a gradually ascending and descending road is that between 1900 and 1911, Norwegian pioneers and their workers carved the two-mile stretch of what is now Moorpark Road out of a steep hillside—totally by hand. These pioneers used nothing more than their own picks, shovels, and ordinary farm equipment to provide a safer route for transporting hay, wheat and barley to the western end of Ventura County—especially to the farmers on the Oxnard Plain and the ships tied up to the Hueneme Wharf.

Gerry Olsen has published a biography about his Norwegian immigrant grandparents, Nils and Ellen Olsen, who settled in the Conejo Valley during the late 1880s.

He is a former public information office for the Ventura Community College District, a member of the Camarillo Ranch Foundation, and retired newspaperman. He is also the author of Don Adolfo Camarillo: A Living Legend, which was released just in time to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Don Adolfo Camarillo’s birth.

Jim Kosinski is a historian/researcher and volunteer at Channel Islands Maritime Museum. His interest in American and European history has taken him to libraries, museums and historical sites both here and abroad. Today’s Civil War presentation will cover some of the less-well-known aspects of the conflict—the naval war.

Maritime conflict, during the Civil War, was fought both as sudden, spectacular lightning battles as well as continual vigilance on the coasts, rivers, and seas.
Union President Abraham Lincoln set the Union’s first naval goal when he declared a blockade of the Southern coasts. His plan was to cut off Southern trade with the outside world and prevent sale of the Confederacy’s major crop, cotton.
The Southern states had few resources compared to the North: a handful of shipyards, a small merchant marine, and no navy at all. Yet the Confederates needed a navy to break the Union blockade and to defend the port cities.

Internationally known researcher and author, Richard Senate, will be speaking about the haunted buildings in Port Hueneme and in other locations around Ventura County.

Senate has appeared regularly on the Discovery Channel and the History Channel. He is also the author of books on ghosts, ghost hunters, and phantomology.