This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.
A reissue of the controversial novel about middle-class Jewish life in Old San Francisco. Originally published in 1900 and set in fin-de-siècle California, Heirs of Yesterdayby Emma Wolf (1865–1932) uses a love story to explore topics such as familial loyalty, the conflict between American individualism and ethno-religious heritage, and anti-Semitism in the United States. The introduction, co-authored by Barbara Cantalupo and Lori Harrison-Kahan, includes biographical background on Wolf based on new research and explores key literary, historical, and religious contexts for Heirs of Yesterday.It incorporates background on the rise of Reform Judaism and the late nineteenth-century Jewish community in San Francisco, while also considering Wolf’s relationship to the broader literary movement of realism and to other writers of her time. As Cantalupo and Harrison-Kahan demonstrate, the publication history and reception of Heirs of Yesterdayilluminate competing notions of Jewish American identity at the turn of the twentieth century. Compared to the familiar ghetto tales penned by Yiddish-speaking, Eastern European immigrant writers, Heirs of Yesterdayoffers a very different narrative about turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish life in the United States. The novel’s central characters, physician Philip May and pianist Jean Willard, are not striving immigrants in the process of learning English and becoming American. Instead, they are native-born citizens who live in the middle-class community of San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, where they interact socially and professionally with their gentile peers. Tailored for students, scholars, and readers of women’s studies, Jewish studies, and American literature and history, this new edition of Heirs of Yesterday highlights the art, historical value, and controversial nature of Wolf’s work.
In Dividing the Public, Matthew Gardner Kelly takes aim at the racial and economic disparities that characterize public education funding in the United States. With California as his focus, Kelly illustrates that the use of local taxes to fund public education was never an inadvertent or de facto product of past practices, but an intentional decision adopted in place of well-known alternatives during the Progressive Era, against past precedent and principle in several states. From efforts to convert expropriated Indigenous and Mexican land into common school funding in the 1850s, to reforms that directed state aid to expanding white suburbs during the years surrounding World War II, Dividing the Public traces, in intricate detail, how a host of policies connected to school funding have divided California by race and class over time. In bringing into view the neglected and poorly understood history of policymaking connected to school finance, Kelly offers a new story about the role public education played in shaping the racially segregated, economically divided, and politically fragmented world of the post-1945 metropolis.
Examining California's formative years, this innovative study seeks to discover the origins of the California dream and the social, psychological, and symbolic impact it has had not only on Californians but also on the rest of the country.
This is a revision of a classic survey history of California. Ever since its first appearance nearly thirty years ago, one of the strengths of this book has been its comprehensive analysis of the vital developments of California in the 20th century. The excellent balance of narration and interpretation continues in this edition. It offers an unparalleled account of contemporary California, the events of the late 80's and 90's, as well as expanded coverage of social and cultural history, particularly on the post-1960's.
