Making San Francisco American

Making San Francisco American

Author: Barbara Berglund

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13:

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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.


Making an American Festival

Making an American Festival

Author: Chiou-ling Yeh

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2008-09-02

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 0520253515

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This provocative history of the largest annual Chinese celebration in the United States—the Chinese New Year parade and beauty pageant in San Francisco—opens a new window onto the evolution of one Chinese American community over the second half of the twentieth century. In a vividly detailed account that incorporates many different voices and perspectives, Chiou-ling Yeh explores the origins of these public events and charts how, from their beginning in 1953, they developed as a result of Chinese business community ties with American culture, business, and politics. What emerges is a fascinating picture of how an ethnic community shaped and was shaped by transnational and national politics, economics, ethnic movements, feminism, and queer activism.


Making the Mission

Making the Mission

Author: Ocean Howell

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-11-17

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 022629028X

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In the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, residents of the city’s iconic Mission District bucked the city-wide development plan, defiantly announcing that in their neighborhood, they would be calling the shots. Ever since, the Mission has become known as a city within a city, and a place where residents have, over the last century, organized and reorganized themselves to make the neighborhood in their own image. In Making the Mission, Ocean Howell tells the story of how residents of the Mission District organized to claim the right to plan their own neighborhood and how they mobilized a politics of place and ethnicity to create a strong, often racialized identity—a pattern that would repeat itself again and again throughout the twentieth century. Surveying the perspectives of formal and informal groups, city officials and district residents, local and federal agencies, Howell articulates how these actors worked with and against one another to establish the very ideas of the public and the public interest, as well as to negotiate and renegotiate what the neighborhood wanted. In the process, he shows that national narratives about how cities grow and change are fundamentally insufficient; everything is always shaped by local actors and concerns.


Carleton Watkins

Carleton Watkins

Author: Tyler Green

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2020-10-20

Total Pages: 594

ISBN-13: 0520377532

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"[A] fascinating and indispensable book."—Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Best Books of 2018—The Guardian Gold Medal for Contribution to Publishing, 2018 California Book Awards Carleton Watkins (1829–1916) is widely considered the greatest American photographer of the nineteenth century and arguably the most influential artist of his era. He is best known for his pictures of Yosemite Valley and the nearby Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias. Watkins made his first trip to Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove in 1861 just as the Civil War was beginning. His photographs of Yosemite were exhibited in New York for the first time in 1862, as news of the Union’s disastrous defeat at Fredericksburg was landing in newspapers and while the Matthew Brady Studio’s horrific photographs of Antietam were on view. Watkins’s work tied the West to Northern cultural traditions and played a key role in pledging the once-wavering West to Union. Motivated by Watkins’s pictures, Congress would pass legislation, signed by Abraham Lincoln, that preserved Yosemite as the prototypical “national park,” the first such act of landscape preservation in the world. Carleton Watkins: Making the West American includes the first history of the birth of the national park concept since pioneering environmental historian Hans Huth’s landmark 1948 “Yosemite: The Story of an Idea.” Watkins’s photographs helped shape America’s idea of the West, and helped make the West a full participant in the nation. His pictures of California, Oregon, and Nevada, as well as modern-day Washington, Utah, and Arizona, not only introduced entire landscapes to America but were important to the development of American business, finance, agriculture, government policy, and science. Watkins’s clients, customers, and friends were a veritable “who’s who” of America’s Gilded Age, and his connections with notable figures such as Collis P. Huntington, John and Jessie Benton Frémont, Eadweard Muybridge, Frederick Billings, John Muir, Albert Bierstadt, and Asa Gray reveal how the Gilded Age helped make today’s America. Drawing on recent scholarship and fresh archival discoveries, Tyler Green reveals how an artist didn’t just reflect his time, but acted as an agent of influence. This telling of Watkins’s story will fascinate anyone interested in American history; the West; and how art and artists impacted the development of American ideas, industry, landscape, conservation, and politics.


A History of the City of San Francisco

A History of the City of San Francisco

Author: John S. Hittell

Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag

Published:

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 3849677869

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The scenes which the author tries to depict for the reader show a multitude of figures and many phases of passion. A host of adventurers flocking from the centers of civilization on the shores of the Atlantic, half across the world, to a remote corner on the coast of what was then the semi-barbarous Pacific, coming to make a brief stay in the rude search for gold, brought a high culture with them, and suddenly lifted their new home to an equal place among the most enlightened communities. The early American settlers in California, instead of being, as many persons at a distance supposed they would be, the mere offscourings of a low rabble, were, in a large proportion, men of knowledge and capacity; and if generally inexperienced in high station and serious responsibility, yet not incompetent for them. This book gives an account of them and their efforts to make San Francisco the town it is today.


American Scream

American Scream

Author: Jonah Raskin

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2004-04-07

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 9780520939349

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Written as a cultural weapon and a call to arms, Howl touched a raw nerve in Cold War America and has been controversial from the day it was first read aloud nearly fifty years ago. This first full critical and historical study of Howl brilliantly elucidates the nexus of politics and literature in which it was written and gives striking new portraits of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. Drawing from newly released psychiatric reports on Ginsberg, from interviews with his psychiatrist, Dr. Philip Hicks, and from the poet's journals, American Scream shows how Howl brought Ginsberg and the world out of the closet of a repressive society. It also gives the first full accounting of the literary figures—Eliot, Rimbaud, and Whitman—who influenced Howl, definitively placing it in the tradition of twentieth-century American poetry for the first time. As he follows the genesis and the evolution of Howl, Jonah Raskin constructs a vivid picture of a poet and an era. He illuminates the development of Beat poetry in New York and San Francisco in the 1950s--focusing on historic occasions such as the first reading of Howl at Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955 and the obscenity trial over the poem's publication. He looks closely at Ginsberg's life, including his relationships with his parents, friends, and mentors, while he was writing the poem and uses this material to illuminate the themes of madness, nakedness, and secrecy that pervade Howl. A captivating look at the cultural climate of the Cold War and at a great American poet, American Scream finally tells the full story of Howl—a rousing manifesto for a generation and a classic of twentieth-century literature.


The Making of "Mammy Pleasant"

The Making of

Author: Lynn Maria Hudson

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9780252027710

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"Pleasant's legacy is steeped in scandal and lore. Was she a voodoo queen who traded in sexual secrets? A madam? A murderer? In The Making of "Mammy Pleasant," Lynn M. Hudson examines the folklore of this remarkable woman's real and imagined powers.


Erotic City

Erotic City

Author: Josh Sides

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 0199874069

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How San Francisco became America's capital of sexual libertinism and a potent symbol in its culture wars


Making and Unmaking of the San Francisco Bay

Making and Unmaking of the San Francisco Bay

Author: Gary C. Howard

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2021-04-23

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 0429946104

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San Francisco Bay is a shallow estuary surrounded by a large population center. The forces that built it began with plate tectonics and involved the collision of the Pacific and North American plates and the subduction of the Juan de Fuka plate. Changes in the climate resulting from the last ice age yielded lower and then higher sea levels. Human activity influenced the Bay. Gold mining during the California gold rush sent masses of slit into the Bay. Humans have also built several major cities and filled significant parts of the Bay. This book describes the natural history and evolution of the SF Bay Area over the last 50 million years through the present and into the future. Key selling features: Summarizes a complex geological, geographical and ecological history Reviews how the San Francisco Bay has changed and will likely change in the future Examines the different roles and various drivers of Bay ecosystem function Includes the role of humans - both first peoples and modern populations - on the Bay Explores San Francisco Bay as an example of general bay ecolgical and environmental issues


The Bonds of Inequality

The Bonds of Inequality

Author: Destin Jenkins

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-04-29

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 022672168X

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Indebtedness, like inequality, has become a ubiquitous condition in the United States. Yet few have probed American cities’ dependence on municipal debt or how the terms of municipal finance structure racial privileges, entrench spatial neglect, elide democratic input, and distribute wealth and power. In this passionate and deeply researched book, Destin Jenkins shows in vivid detail how, beyond the borrowing decisions of American cities and beneath their quotidian infrastructure, there lurks a world of politics and finance that is rarely seen, let alone understood. Focusing on San Francisco, The Bonds of Inequality offers a singular view of the postwar city, one where the dynamics that drove its creation encompassed not only local politicians but also banks, credit rating firms, insurance companies, and the national municipal bond market. Moving between the local and the national, The Bonds of Inequality uncovers how racial inequalities in San Francisco were intrinsically tied to municipal finance arrangements and how these arrangements were central in determining the distribution of resources in the city. By homing in on financing and its imperatives, Jenkins boldly rewrites the history of modern American cities, revealing the hidden strings that bind debt and power, race and inequity, democracy and capitalism.