Kathleen Gregory Klein traces female paid, professional private investigators in British, Canadian, and American novels, revealing that the detective novel is both a reflection of and potential barrier to social change for women. This edition adds sixty new female private eyes to the roster and includes an afterword that assesses the current state of the genre's new and old novels. A comprehensive bibliography and a character list update the field through mid-1994.
The customary picture of the World War II era in California has been dominated by accounts of the Japanese American concentration camps, African Americans, and women on the home front. The Way We Really Were substantially enlivens this view, addressing topics that have been neglected or incompletely treated in the past to create a more rounded picture of the wartime situation at home. Exploring the developments brought to fruition by the war and linking them to their roots in earlier decades, contributors address the diversity of the musical scene, which arose from a cross-pollination of styles brought by Okies, blacks, and Mexican migrants. They examine increased political involvement by women, Hollywood's response to the war, and the merging of business and labor interests in the Bay Area Council. They also reveal how wartime dynamics led to substantial environmental damage and lasting economic gains by industry. The Way We Really Were examines significant wartime changes in the circumstances of immigrant groups that have been largely overlooked by historians. Among these are Italian Americans, heavily insular and pro-Fascist before the war and very pro-American and assimilationist after, and Chinese American men, who achieved new legitimacy and entitlement through military service. Also included is a look at cultural negotiation among multiple ethnic groups in the Golden State. A valuable addition to the literature on California history, The War We Really Were provides an entree into new areas of scholarship and a fresh look at familiar ones.
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 1986.
Focuses on the 19th-century transformation in San Francisco--from Gold Rush to earthquake--to show how the city's diverse residents created a modern American city through everyday "cultural frontiers," such as restaurants, hotels, and annual fairs and expositions, among others.
"Among the judicial immigrants ... were the southerner David S. Terry of Texas and the northerner Stephen J. Field of New York. These men served on California's highest court during its formative, strenuous years from 1855 to 1863. ... The intellectual similarities and differences that these two shared ... played themselves out over a period of 35 years and brought about a series of events that neither man could have envisioned. Their exchanges began as wary judicial amity within the courtroom, but in short order spilled out into the community as public grudges. Neither judge could tolerate the other's regional provincialism; hence, lifelong resentments inevitably turned into a bitterness that led to tragedy"--Foreword, p. vii.
This historical study shows how San Francisco and Baltimore were central to American expansion through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The history of the United States is often told as a movement westward, beginning at the Atlantic coast and following farmers across the continent. But early settlements and towns sprung up along the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, as Spaniards and Englishmen took Indian land and converted it into private property. In this ambitious study of historical geography and urban development, Mary P. Ryan reframes the story of American expansion. Baltimore and San Francisco share common roots as early coastal trading centers immersed in the international circulation of goods and ideas. Ryan traces their beginnings back to the first human habitation of each area, showing how the juggernaut toward capitalism and nation-building could not commence until Europeans had taken the land for city building. She then recounts how Mexican ayuntamientos and Anglo-American city councils pioneered a prescient form of municipal sovereignty that served as both a crucible for democracy and a handmaid of capitalism. Moving into the nineteenth century, Ryan shows how the citizens of Baltimore and San Francisco molded the shape of the modern city: the gridded downtown, rudimentary streetcar suburbs, and outlying great parks. This history culminates in the era of the Civil War when the economic engines of cities helped forge the East and the West into one nation.
Award-winning historian Leonard L. Richards gives us an authoritative and revealing portrait of an overlooked harbinger of the terrible battle that was to come. When gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in 1848, Americans of all stripes saw the potential for both wealth and power. Among the more calculating were Southern slave owners. By making California a slave state, they could increase the value of their slaves—by 50 percent at least, and maybe much more. They could also gain additional influence in Congress and expand Southern economic clout, abetted by a new transcontinental railroad that would run through the South. Yet, despite their machinations, California entered the union as a free state. Disillusioned Southerners would agitate for even more slave territory, leading to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and, ultimately, to the Civil War itself.
A Year of Mud and Gold is a collection of over two hundred excerpts from letters and diaries of ordinary men and women caught up in the rapid transformation of San Francisco during its gold rush heyday, 1849?50. Together these accounts render a rich mosaic of San Francisco?s metamorphosis from a small Mexican outpost into a rough-and-tumble boomtown filled with gamblers and prostitutes, evangelists and entrepreneurs?men, women, and children from all parts of the world, arriving in California with the dream of striking it rich. ø The correspondents come from a variety of economic and social backgrounds. Some are barely literate, while others write as well as the finest authors of nineteenth-century travel literature. Their writings address a broad range of concerns, from business prospects and consumer prices to social mores and popular amusements. The letters and diaries also hold clues to processes central to frontier history: the Americanization of Hispanic California, the stresses that migration placed on individuals and families, the fluidity of boomtown economies, and the nature of gender and race relations in an urban population of immigrants.
By 1867 black San Franciscans had gained access to public transportation. In 1869 they were granted the right to vote by the state of California. In 1875 they fought for desegregated schools and won. Yet in 1957, Willie Mays was initially denied the opportunity to purchase a home in an exclusive San Francisco neighborhood because he was black. In Black San Francisco, Albert Broussard explores race relations in a city where whites, for the most part, were outwardly civil to blacks while denying them employment opportunities and political power. Understanding the texture of the racial caste system, he argues, is critical to understanding why blacks made so little progress in employment, housing, and politics despite the absence of segregation laws. When it came to racial equality in the early twentieth century, Broussard argues, the liberal progressive image of San Francisco was largely a facade. Illustrating how black San Franciscans struggled to achieve equality in the same manner as their counterparts in the Midwest and East, he challenges the rhetoric of progress and opportunity with evidence of the reality of inequality for black San Franciscans. Black San Francisco is considerably broader in scope than any previous study of African-Americans in the West. It provides extensive coverage of the city's black community during the Great Depression and the New Deal, details civil rights activities from 1915 to 1954, and provides extensive biographical material on local black leaders. In his reconstruction of the plight of San Francisco's black citizens, Broussard reveals a population that, despite its small size before 1940, did not accept second-class citizenship passively yet remained nonviolent into the 1960s. He also shows how World War II was a watershed for Black San Francisco, bringing thousands of southern migrants to the bay area to work in the war industries. These migrants, in tandem with native black residents, formed coalitions with white liberals to attack racial inequality more vigorously and successfully than at any previous time in San Francisco's history.
