page_title: Mary Floyd Williams
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Mary Floyd Williams / Career
caption_attribution_description: Medal of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1856. "Organized 9th June 1851. Reorganized 14th May 1856". on back: "Be Just and Fear Not", "Fiat Justitia Ruat Coelum" (Let there be justice though the sky fall). From the collection of Mr. Charles B. Turril
context_page_description: Mary Floyd Williams was an American librarian and California historian. In 1918, she became the first woman to complete a doctorate in history at the University of California, with a dissertation on the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance.
context_section_description: Williams moved back to California to work as a librarian at the Mechanics' Institute Library of San Francisco in 1900. In 1902 she directed the University of California's first Summer School of Library Science. In 1915 she served as secretary of the reception committee for the Panama–Pacific Historical Congress.
  Williams was one of the first two readers at the Huntington Library when it opened for researchers in 1920. Her dissertation, History of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1851: A Study of Social Control on the California Frontier in the Days of the Gold Rush (1919), was published by the University of California Press in 1921. She also edited a published collection, Papers of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1851 (1919). 
  Other books by Williams included Library floors and floor coverings (1897), Reading list for children's librarians (1901, with Bertha Mower Brown Shaw), and a historical novel set in 1850s San Francisco, Fortune, Smile Once More! (1946).  She also wrote scholarly articles published in the California Historical Society Quarterly. 
  Williams was a lecturer with the University of California Extension, teaching California history. She traveled in Asia in the 1920s and 1930s, including Tibet, Sri Lanka, Burma, Cambodia, Thailand, Bali, India, China, and Japan, and gave lectures about her travels with a slide show of her own photographs.
caption: Medal of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1856. "Organized 9th June 1851. Reorganized 14th May 1856", as presented in the frontispiece of Williams' history of the Committee, 1921.
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