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University of California Press

Imperial San Francisco, With a New Preface

Urban Power, Earthly Ruin
by Gray Brechin (Author)
Paperback eBook
Price: $29.95 / £25.00
Publication Date: Oct 2006
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 437
ISBN: 9780520250086
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 85 b/w photographs, 7 maps, 1 graph
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About the Book

First published in 1999, this celebrated history of San Francisco traces the exploitation of both local and distant regions by prominent families—the Hearsts, de Youngs, Spreckelses, and others—who gained power through mining, ranching, water and energy, transportation, real estate, weapons, and the mass media. The story uncovered by Gray Brechin is one of greed and ambition on an epic scale. Brechin arrives at a new way of understanding urban history as he traces the connections between environment, economy, and technology and discovers links that led, ultimately, to the creation of the atomic bomb and the nuclear arms race. In a new preface, Brechin considers the vulnerability of cities in the post-9/11 twenty-first century.

About the Author

Gray Brechin has worked as a journalist and television producer and is coauthor of Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream (UC Press). He received his Ph.D. from the U.C. Berkeley Department of Geography in 1998

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Preface to the 2006 Edition
Preface to the First Edition: The Urban Maelstrom
Introduction: New Romes for a New World

Part I: Foundations of Dominion
1. The Pyramid of Mining
2. Water Mains and Bloodlines

Part II: The Thought Shapers
3. The Scott Brothers: Arms and the Overland Mutiny
4. The De Youngs: Society Invents Itself
5. The Hearsts: Racial Supremacy and the Digestion of "All Mexico"

Part III: Remote Control
6. Toward Limitless Energy
7. The University, the Gate, and "the Gadget"

Notes
A Note on Sources
Select Bibliography
Index

Reviews

"Challenging San Francisco's popular image as a tolerant, carefree, gracious city, Brechin unearths 150 years of deeply unsettling history. . . . Enlivened with period engravings, photos, political cartoons, magazine art, posters and maps, this stirring, environmentally conscious history ranks with Kevin Starr's Americans and the California Dream, powerfully establishing the city on the bay as a true emblem of the atomic age."
— Publishers Weekly
"Students of Bay Area history will find much of value here, as will anyone concerned about the destructive ties between urban centers and nature beyond." 
— San Francisco Chronicle
"For anyone who is sick and tired of the vast literature of L.A.-bashing, Imperial San Francisco will come as a refreshing surprise. Here is a book that fairly sizzles with outrage over water-grabs and land-grabs, “environmental blunders” and “the dynastic, corporate and political alliances that enable some cities to claim and acquire empires as their rightful due"—and yet the target is quaint and charming San Francisco rather than the customary urban whipping boy, Los Angeles. . . . Imperial San Francisco is an intentionally provocative work, and Brechin may not convince every reader that a “dark irrationality” underlies the glorious achievements of the pioneers who built the city in the first place. But no one who reads his book will ever look at quaint old San Francisco in quite the same way again."
— Los Angeles Times
"Part theory, part history, but with a whole lot of graft, sex and murder thrown in, Brechin has pioneered a genre: potboiler urban history." 
— Oregonian
"Brechin presents a book rich in historical anecdotes, taking the reader from the gold rush to World War II, when UC Berkeley, which had been heavily financed by the Hearst family and other elites, oversaw aspects of the Manhattan Project. His insights on the propaganda of civic monuments prove provocative. The profiles of San Francisco's yellow journalists-Irving Murray Scott, Michael deYoung, and William Randolph Hearst-expose the ability of the press to communicate visions of empire, to indoctrinate the community in those visions, and to obscure the silent mechanisms of urban power that propelled those visions forward. Based on the portrait Brechin paints, one wonders if Orson Welles was too kind to Hearst."
— Environmental History
"Imperial San Francisco is written in an accessible manner, with clear graphic representation. The city grows, devours, and transforms the world as you read."
— Economic Geography
"A classic of urban history, environmental history, California history, and socially oriented architectural criticism, this work contains scholarship that is thrilling in its comprehensiveness. Never before have the inner dynamics of the regional civilization centered in San Francisco been so comprehensively integrated."—Dr. Kevin Starr, State Librarian of California, author of Americans and the California Dream

"Imperial San Francisco is a great gift of a book, the product of extraordinary research, insight, and hard work that connects a lot of dots and gives me a reinvigorated focus and curiosity [about] what California culture was and what might become of it all."—Gary Snyder