Available From UC Press

The Public City

The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900
Philip J. Ethington
Philip J. Ethington challenges the assumptions of several decades of urban history that treat American urban politics as the expression of social-group community experience. Instead, he maintains in The Public City, social-group identities of race, class, ethnicity, and gender were politically constructed in the public sphere in the process of political mobilization and journalistic discourse.
Philip J. Ethington is Associate Professor of History at the University of Southern California.