Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846-1906

by Barbara Berglund

The San Francisco that rose from the ashes of the 1906 earthquake and fire was a city of rigid social stratification-a city determined to contain its diverse and disorderly rough-and-tumble past some sixty years after its acquisition by the United States.

Barbara Berglund vividly describes San Francisco's rapid evolution from Mexican outpost to crown jewel of America's western empire, taking readers back to an earlier and more chaotic time when class definitions and social conventions were much more fluid. Berglund argues that the city's rapid rise from a multicultural boomtown to a racially and socially stratified metropolis reflected the careful efforts of a nascent elite to order its inhabitants through political and cultural means.

Berglund analyzes the cultural spaces that showcased the contests that would determine the social order and who defined it. The book's central chapters provide snapshots of the micro-workings of power on five key cultural restaurants, hotels, and boardinghouses; places of amusement, ranging from the brothels of the Barbary Coast to the Pacific Museum of Anatomy and Science; Chinatown's tourist terrain; the Mechanics' Institute's annual fairs; and the 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition—the first such expo held west of Chicago and an image-building opportunity for the city's elites.

By focusing on the role of cultural frontiers in the urban west, Berglund offers a new take on western history that explores the role of market-driven cultural institutions, demonstrating that the market was as important as the state in structuring power relationships in nineteenth-century imperial America. She shows that control over meanings ascribed to race, class, and gender—especially those generated in the city's cultural spaces—was critical to the incorporation of San Francisco into the fabric of the American nation.

Genres: History

312 pages, Hardcover

First published October 3, 2007

Reviews

[Sandra Oldfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange order to the chapters or how it covered things seemed strange, but the content was very well researched and good.

[Luis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This started as a PhD thesis, and reads like one. But if you’re the kind of person who can plunge through that, it’s a brilliant book, explaining how the racially mixed and roughly egalitarian culture of mining-era SF was gradually molded into something acceptable to “cultured” Americans – both to the nouveau riche of the West who wanted to build a city acceptable to the East, and to those from the East who were flooding into SF. Really fascinating read, and I think has some lessons applicable to the “uncultured” programmers who have to constantly resist cultural change imposed by more “refined” outsiders; and also to "cultured" programmers imposing (intentionally or not) change on those who already live here - both live themes in SF.