Harbingers of the City: Men and Their Monuments in Nineteenth Century San Francisco

1973 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-162
Author(s):  
FRANK MAZZI
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
The City

“Base Falsehoods” and the Genuine Article: The Visual Economy of San Francisco

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy K. DeFalco Lippert
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
Urban Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Visual Medium ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Universal Language ◽  
The City

In the burgeoning urban centers of the United States in the nineteenth century, anonymous denizens interpreted one another and presented themselves through the visual medium. Publicly displayed and circulated imagery was broadly accessible to San Francisco’s diverse array of immigrants. Photographs and other illustrations provided newcomers with a universal language—a way to view and explore each other and a means of conceptualizing San Francisco. As the city developed and tents gave way to buildings, the modes of production, circulation, and display of visual ephemera grew apace, revealing their adaptability to the burgeoning market economy and their preeminence in San Francisco’s urban culture. A competitive commercial culture among San Franciscan photographers catered to and often exploited public anxieties over the divide between appearance and reality.

Culture Maintenance, Occupational Change, and Social Status

2017 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-25
Author(s):  
Robert Llewellyn Tyler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Status ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Cultural Activity ◽  
Language Retention ◽  
Culture Maintenance ◽  
Immigrant Culture ◽  
The City

Through a consideration of residential propinquity, religious and cultural activity, language retention, and levels of exogamy, this article provides a microstudy of the Welsh community in San Francisco and identifies the Welsh as a distinct ethnolinguistic community in the city during the late decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. What was the nature of Welsh immigrant culture, and to what extent were working-class Welsh people involved in its expression? In addition, through an analysis of intragenerational changes in socioeconomic status, as indicated by occupational mobility, the article tests the assumption that the Welsh were prime illustrations of the “American Dream,” thus providing a clearer picture than the images promulgated by contemporary Welsh leaders who strove to emphasize the industry and upward mobility of their fellow countrymen. Did the Welsh as a group occupy a privileged position in the occupational hierarchy, and were they universally successful in improving on this position?

“A True Revival of Religion”: Protestants and the San Francisco Graft Prosecutions, 1906–1909

1994 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-49
Author(s):  
Douglas Firth Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Great Earthquake ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Labor Party ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The City

Almost a year after the great earthquake and fire of April 1906, San Francisco clergyman William Rader declared, “We are having a true revival of religion.” Writing in the San Francisco-based Congregationalist weekly Pacific, Rader was not referring to the visit of a mass evangelist; rather, he meant the graft prosecutions officially launched in October 1906 against the Union Labor party administration of the city. He compared Rudolph Spreckels, a reform-minded member of the city's financial elite who was helping to fund the prosecution, and Francis J. Heney, the lead prosecuting attorney, to the late-nineteenth-century revival team of Dwight L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey. “God is moving the city,” Rader asserted, “and when a number of our Supervisors and other officials are sent to prison we will be more free…. Thank God the Christ spirit is not dead; it lives.”

Consent to Ascent The Baltimore Affair and the U.S. Rise to World Power Status

1984 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
Joyce S. Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Political Leader ◽  
Coastal Cities ◽  
World Power ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Commercial Center ◽  
The U.S

The city where trouble began in 1891, Valparaíso, Chile, was a memorable place. Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, the nineteenth-century Chilean historian and political leader, has rightly written that the history of Valparaíso has been the history of the sea. An old port, once a more important city than it is now, built around and especially on top of steep hills reached by rickety lifts, Valparaíso still has a grace and character unlike that of most other ports—its landscape resembles an untamed San Francisco. At one time it was a thriving commercial center and hub of naval activity, important not only for the direction of Chilean history but for that of much of South America as well. In the nineteenth century, with Chilean independence and the later decay of the Peruvian port of Callao, Valparaíso rapidly became the maritime capital of the Pacific and an important focus of naval enterprises for continental defense. Then, after decades of prosperity, its importance declined and the fortunes of other coastal cities arose.

Celebrity Culture and the Gold Rush Metropolis

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy K. DeFalco Lippert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Pacific Coast ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Exchange Networks ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The City

With the gold rush, San Francisco almost instantaneously became an important stop for a host of international entertainment tours that expanded well beyond the Atlantic world, to Australia as well as the Pacific Coast. The term celebrity was first employed as a noun in the 1840s and 1850s, and from its inception, this cultural phenomenon was intrinsically linked with and profited handsomely from transnational exchange networks—the conduits for the transmission of print and visual culture, as well as the migration of people and capital. Theatrical entertainment flourished in nineteenth-century San Francisco, as did the trade in celebrity portraits. In this context, certain charismatic individuals emerged: notably female stars, including Lola Montez and Adah Isaacs Menken, who embodied the trend of self-representation that overtook the city. The celebrity thrived in a place where human identity could become a consumable commodity—in turn, it often became all-consuming..

Consuming Identities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy DeFalco Lippert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Revolving Door ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Production Methods ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
The City

Along with the rapid expansion of the market economy and industrial production methods, innovations including photography, lithography, and steam printing created a pictorial revolution in the nineteenth century. Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco explores the significance of that revolution in one of its vanguard cities: San Francisco, the revolving door of the gold rush and the hub of Pacific migration and trade. The proliferation of visual prints, ephemera, spectacles, and technologies transformed public values and perceptions, and its legacy was as significant as the print revolution that preceded it. In their correspondence, diaries, portraits, and reminiscences, thousands of migrants to the city by the Bay demonstrated that visual media constituted a central means by which to navigate the bewildering host of changes taking hold around them in the second half of the nineteenth century. Images themselves were inextricably associated with these world-changing forces; they were commodities, but they also possessed special cultural qualities that gave them new meaning and significance. Visual media transcended traditional boundaries of language and culture that had divided groups within the same urban space. From the 1848 conquest of California and the gold discovery to the disastrous earthquake and fire of 1906, San Francisco anticipated broader national transformations in the commodification, implementation, and popularity of images. For the city’s inhabitants and visitors, an array of imagery came to mediate, intersect with, and even constitute social interaction in a world where virtual reality was becoming normative.

‘Imagined San Francisco’: Unpacking Urban Regime Theory through Interactive Cartography

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-143
Author(s):  
Ocean Howell
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Regime Theory ◽  
Commercial Development ◽  
Urban Regime Theory ◽  
Digital Mapping ◽  
Urban Regime ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
The City ◽  
Interactive Cartography

American urban historians have begun to understand that digital mapping provides a potentially powerful tool to describe political power. There are now important projects that map change in the American city along a number of dimensions, including zoning, suburbanization, commercial development, transportation infrastructure, and especially segregation. Most projects use their visual sources to illustrate the material consequences of the policies of powerful agencies and dominant planning ‘regimes.’ As useful as these projects are, they often inadvertently imbue their visualizations with an aura of inevitability, and thereby present political power as a kind of static substance–possess this and you can remake the city to serve your interests. A new project called ‘Imagined San Francisco’ is motivated by a desire to expand upon this approach, treating visual material not only to illustrate outcomes, but also to interrogate historical processes, and using maps, plans, drawings, and photographs not only to show what did happen, but also what might have happened. By enabling users to layer a series of historical urban plans–with a special emphasis on unrealized plans–‘Imagined San Francisco’ presents the city not only as a series of material changes, but also as a contingent process and a battleground for political power.

‘Otherwise in London’ or, the ‘Essence of Things’: Modernity and Estrangement in the Nineteenth-Century Cityscape

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Representation ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.

Transportation and the Environment

2017 ◽  
Vol 94 (3) ◽  
pp. 37-61
Author(s):  
Douglas R. Littlefield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Sierra Nevada ◽  
Mississippi River ◽  
San Joaquin Valley ◽  
Eastern United States ◽  
Major Health ◽  
San Joaquin River ◽  
Natural Wetlands ◽  
Prevailing View

Some histories of California describe nineteenth-century efforts to reclaim the extensive swamplands and shallow lakes in the southern part of California's San Joaquin Valley – then the largest natural wetlands habitat west of the Mississippi River – as a herculean venture to tame a boggy wilderness and turn the region into an agricultural paradise. Yet an 1850s proposition for draining those marshes and lakes primarily was a scheme to improve the state's transportation. Swampland reclamation was a secondary goal. Transport around the time of statehood in 1850 was severely lacking in California. Only a handful of steamboats plied a few of the state's larger rivers, and compared to the eastern United States, roads and railroads were nearly non-existent. Few of these modes of transportation reached into the isolated San Joaquin Valley. As a result, in 1857 the California legislature granted an exclusive franchise to the Tulare Canal and Land Company (sometimes known as the Montgomery franchise, after two of the firm's founders). The company's purpose was to connect navigable canals from the southern San Joaquin Valley to the San Joaquin River, which entered from the Sierra Nevada about half way up the valley. That stream, in turn, joined with San Francisco Bay, and thus the canals would open the entire San Joaquin Valley to world-wide commerce. In exchange for building the canals, the Montgomery franchise could collect tolls for twenty years and sell half the drained swamplands (the other half was to be sold by the state). Land sales were contingent upon the Montgomery franchise reclaiming the marshes. Wetlands in the mid-nineteenth century were not viewed as they are today as fragile wildlife habitats but instead as impediments to advancing American ideals and homesteads across the continent. Moreover, marshy areas were seen as major health menaces, with the prevailing view being that swampy regions’ air carried infectious diseases.

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