38. Framing Spaces in Motion: Tracing Visualizations of Earthquakes into Twentieth-Century San Francisco

2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-56
Author(s):  
Susanne Leikam
2019 ◽  
pp. 84-114
Author(s):  
David Vogel

This chapter begins by exploring the conflicts over Southern California's beaches and coastal areas and then turns to efforts to protect the San Francisco Bay and the entire Pacific coast. In addition to its aesthetic value and opportunities for recreation, the coast is a major economic resource. It enhances the value of property located on or near it, and the coastal area also contains substantial deposits of oil. Precisely because the coast is a scarce and valuable resource with so many competing uses, protecting it, like the coastal redwoods, has been highly contentious. On one important dimension, the dynamics of two of the important cases described in this chapter depart from the book's explanatory framework. The campaigns to establish the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the world's first coastal protection agency, as well as the more sweeping California Coastal Commission, received no business support. In both cases, the interests of business were not divided. Rather, their creation was made possible by extensive citizen mobilization, an outcome that reveals the important role played by public support for environmental protection in California beginning in the middle of the twentieth century.


Author(s):  
Chris Coffman

“Seeing Stein’s Masculinity” analyses the shifting significance of visual images of and written texts about Stein. Driven by recent reinterpretations of Jacques Lacan’s theory of the gaze, this chapter reads his theories against the grain to counter arguments about the visual that reproduce binary thinking about gender. Queering his account of the gaze makes it possible to register the expanded array of masculinities mobilized in photographs of Stein by George Platt Lynes, Henri Manuel, and Man Ray as well as in their recent reception during the 2011 Seeing Gertrude Stein exhibit in San Francisco. Moreover, Stein’s own comments in The Autobiography about being photographed by Man Ray queer the heteronormative gaze that drives James Agee’s review of that book in the September 11, 1933 issue of Time whose cover featured Lynes’s image of Stein in profile. Tracking changes that have taken place between the early twentieth century and the present in attitudes toward her queer sexuality and masculinity, this chapter argues that traces of abjection remain in contemporary reactions to Stein despite greater acceptance of her gender, sexuality, and innovative writing.


Author(s):  
Alex Schafran

Silicon Valley as we know it emerged in part from encounters between the technology of the valley and the Bohemian culture of San Francisco. This San Francisco–Silicon Valley nexus would produce one of the most dynamic economic growth stories any region has ever seen. Over the course of the latter part of the twentieth century, this encounter eventually turned both San Francisco and Silicon Valley into massive jobs engines. This chapter examines the spaces where this engine was most powerful, the places that drove the economic cart which attracted so many new residents and so much investment. These are also the places that largely did either very little or not enough to house the people who held these jobs. They did even less for those who had suffered under the segregated conditions of the earlier era.


2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 97-101
Author(s):  
Jonah Raskin

This essay takes a literary journey to Jack London State Historic Park, the National Steinbeck Center, and the Beat Museum. An exploration of the shrines that are devoted to writers and which attract readers from around the world as well as close to home, the essay explores California’s identity as a cultural destination for tourists as well as for natives of the Golden State. By linking specific geographical places, such as Glen Ellen, Salinas, and San Francisco to books and to their authors, California’s literary shrines weave a kind of cultural magic that transcends time and place and invigorates twentieth-century classics such as Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Kerouac’s On the Road, and Jack London’s The Iron Heel.


2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 419-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kif Augustine-Adams

On a hopeful September day in 1912, Gim Pon, a twenty-five year old Chinese man from Canton, boarded the steamship Siberia in Hong Kong harbor to sail west across the Pacific. The Siberia docked briefly in San Francisco, but Gim Pon's destination, and that of seven fellow Chinese travelers, was not California but the northern Mexican state of Sonora. In the early twentieth century, thousands of men like Gim Pon immigrated to Mexico, boosting the Chinese population there from slightly over 1,000 in 1895 to more than 24,000 in the mid-1920s. Sonora, which hugs Arizona at the United States/Mexico border, was a popular destination, and hosted the largest Chinese population of any Mexican state through the 1920s. Once in Sonora, Gim Pon adapted to life in Mexico: he changed his name to Francisco Gim, learned Spanish, and became naturalized as a Mexican citizen on February 27, 1920. Most importantly, he formed a family with Julia Delgado.


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