Books About San Francisco

There have been numerous books written about San Francisco over the years. Listed below are some titles that may interest you. They have also been organized by time period for your convenience. Click on desired period below.

• General (spanning multiple periods)
• The Early Days (Through the 19th Century)
• Turn of the Century through WWII (Early 20th Century)
• Post-WWII to the 21st Century
  
  

If you have any other book recommendations, please feel free to contact us.

Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin. Gray Brechin, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006. Locates San Francisco within the historical context of America’s Manifest Destiny, its strategic significance to the United States as both a commercial and military port for geo-political expansion into the Pacific. (Google this book)

 

The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900. Philip J. Ethington, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. University of The author interprets American politics from 1850 to 1900 on the assumption that 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. (Google this book)

 

Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture. James Brook, Chris Carlsson & Nancy J. Peters, San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers, 1998. An anthology of lost, forgotten and obscured histories of San Francisco.  Stories of immigrants and minorities, sailors and waterfront workers, and poets, artists and neighborhood activists. (Google this book)

 

Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism. Rebecca Solnit & Susan Schwartzenberg, Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2002. The effects of San Francisco’s housing squeeze and accelerated gentrification of low-income neighborhoods created a cultural crisis. (Google this book)

 

Left Coast City: Progressive Politics in San Francisco, 1975-1991. Richard Edward DeLeon, Laurence, KS: University of Kansas, 1992. Richard DeLeon analyzes the successes and failures of the progressive movement as it topples the business-dominated progrowth regime, imposes stringent controls on growth and development, and achieves political control of city hall. (Google this book)

 

Historic San Francisco: A Concise History and Guide. Rand Richards, Canada: Heritage House Publishers, 2007. Each of the ten chapters historically chronicles a meaningful period of time between significant milestones (i.e. the goldrush of 1849 or the earthquake of 1906). (Google this book)

 

City For Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco. Chester W. Hartman, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002. Politics and urban development - Centering his account on the downtown Yerba Buena Center Project, Hartman illuminates the conflicts of interest, ambitions, misrepresentations, extravagant promises, brutality, waste, incompetence in the name of “urban renewal”. (Google this book)

 

The Contested City. John H. Mollenkopf, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. Using Boston and San Francisco as case studies, the author shows how urban development programs influenced and were influenced by big-city politics. (Google this book)

 

 

San Francisco Stories: Great Writers on the City.  John Miller, ed., San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 1990.  Well-known authors such as Amy Tan, Jack Kerouac and Anne Lamott offer reflective essays on San Francisco. (Google this book)

 

 

San Francisco: The Story of A City. John Bernard McGloin, S.J., San Rafael, CA: Presidio Press, 1978. An historical overview of San Francisco as compiled by a history professor at the University of San Francisco. (Google this book)

 

 

San Francisco: A Cultural and Literary History. Mick Sinclair, Northampton, MA: Interlink Books, 2004. Part of the “Cities of Imagination” series, Sinclair provides an easy-to-read overview of the city’s geography, diverse cultures, and interesting histories. (Google this book)

 

 

Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco. Judy Yung, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995. Documents the “unbinding” of Chinese women from the turn-of-the-century to the end of WWII . (Google this book)

 

 

The Unimpressible Race: A Century of Educational struggle by the Chinese in San Francisco. Victor Low, San Francisco, CA: East/West Publishing Company, Inc., 1982. How Chinese Americans moved the Supreme Court and the U.S. government to recognize the basic right of children with limited language skills. (Google this book)

 

 

We Are The People Our Parents Warned Us Against: The Classic Account of the 1960s Counter-Culture in San Francisco. Nicholas von Hoffman, Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, Inc., 1989. The colorful history of the rise of the social philosophy and politics ushered in by a proud and defiant youth subculture. (Google this book)

 

 

The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience. J. S. Holliday, New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1981. A classic eye-witness account, i.e. from gold-digger William Swain’s personal diary, of America’s westward expansion. (Google this book)

 

 

The Annals of San Francisco. Frank Soulè, John H. Gihon & James Nisbet, Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Hills Books, 1999. Written by three journalists who were witnesses to and participants in the extraordinary events they describe. (Google this book)

 

 

The Bad City in the Good War: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Diego. Roger W. Lotchin, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003. Lotchin shows how in World War II the usual north-south hostilities were put aside in favor of a united front against the totalitarian governments who were threatening California cities and beaches combining resources to fight fascism. (Google this book)

 

The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld. Herbert Asbury, New York, NY: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1933. Barbary Coast is Herbert Asbury’s classic chronicle of the birth of San Francisco—a violent explosion from which the infant city emerged full-grown and raging wild. (Google this book)

 

Sam Brannan, Builder of San Francisco. Louis John Stellman, Fairfield, CA: James Stevenson Publisher, 1996. The colorful life story of the man who played a central role in the organizing of the historic “vigilance committees” which sought to restore order in crime-terrorized San Francisco. (Google this book)

 

 

Chinese San Francisco 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community. Yong Chen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Chen explores the trans-Pacific links between the Chinese immigrants in San Francisco and their ancestral homeland in Guangdong province through Chinese and English language newspapers and magazines, personal diaries and papers, census manuscripts, and many contemporary writings of the period. (Google this book)

 

El Dorado: Adventures in the Path of Empire. Bayard Taylor, Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2000. The remarkable emergence of California through the eyes of Horace Greeley, dispatched by the New York Tribune in 1849. (Google this book)

 

 

Ethnicity and Entrepreneurship: The New Chinese Immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bernard Wong, Needham Heights, MA: Allen & Bacon, 1998. This book focuses on how the new Chinese immigrants use their ethnic and personal resources to make economic adaptations in the US. Sociologists and anthropologists. (Google this book)

 

 

The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and The New American Dream. H. W. Brands, New York, NY: Anchor Books, 2002. Brands explores the far-reaching implications of this pivotal point in U.S. history interweaving politics of the times, illuminating national issues and it’s effect on the way Americans view their destinies. (Google this book)

 

The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904-1924. Henry (Yoshitaka) Kiyama, Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1999.  Kiyama's autobiographical story follows four young friends who hit U.S. shores in 1904 as they live through the great earthquake, World War I, and the influenza epidemic; suffer prejudice and misunderstanding; acquire businesses and picture brides; and turn from youths into men. (Google this book)

 

Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown.  Victor G. and Brett de Bary Nee, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972.  Portrait of San Francisco's Chinatown in the early 1970s -- it’s poverty, unemployment, low-wage garment and restaurant industries, and gangs. (Google this book)

 

Murder by the Bay: Historical Homicide In and About the City of San Francisco. Charles F. Adams, Sanger, CA: Word Dancer Press, 2005. Murders in San Francisco, from 1856 to the City Hall murders of 1978, that captivated both the city and the country. (Google this book)

 

 

New Lands, New Men: America and the Second Great Age of Discovery. William H. Goetzmann, New York: NY, Penguin Books, 1986.  Shows how the explorations of Europeans facilitated the development of the American West and the work of American scientists, explorers, and artists-- spanning the 17th through 19th centuries in Europe and America. (Google this book)

 

The Holy Family Sisters of San Francisco : a sketch of their first fifty years, 1872-1922.  D.J. Kavanagh, San Francisco California: Gilmartin Publishing,1922. A comprehensive history of the formation and work of the Sisters of the Holy Family in San Francisco. (Google this book)

 

1906: A Novel. James Dalessandro, San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2004. A "riveting account of corruption, greed, and murder in the City by the Bay". (Google this book)

 

 

It Happened in San Francisco. Maxine Cass, Guilford, CT.  Morris Book Publishing, 2006. Thirty stories recounting some of San Francisco’s most captivating moments from 1776 to 2004. (Google this book)

 

 

No Hiding Place: Empowerment and Recovery for Our Troubled Communities. Cecil Williams with Rebecca Laird, San Francisco, CA. HarperCollins, 1992. The pastor of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, which is nationally known for the success of its community activism, speaks of the spiritual power that drives the church's innovative recovery programs. (Google this book)

 

San Francisco: From the Gold Rush to Cyberspace. Charles A. Fracchia & Thomas Stauffer, San Francisco, CA. San Francisco Chamber of Commerce & Marcoa Publishing Inc. 2000. With more than 100 historical photographs, Stauffer pays tribute to the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce's commitment to the economic development of the city during the past 150 years and Fracchia tells of the people and the forces that have shaped the city since its founding as an outpost of the Spanish empire. (Google this book)

 

San Francisco’s West of Twin Peaks. Jacqueline Proctor, San Francisco, CA: Arcadia Publishing, 2006.  The development of west of Twin Peaks as “suburbs in the city”. (Google this book)

 

 

The Far Western Frontier 1830-1860. Ray Allen Billington, New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1956.  The development of Texas, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah and California – the differences in geography & climate, native races and early history. (Google this book)

 

Here is The Golden Gate: Its Romance, Its History and Its Derring-Do. Neill C. Wilson, New York: William Morrow & Company, 1962. This is not about the bridge but the discovery and naming of the Golden Gate - the ships that passed through and the land surrounding the “Gate”. (Google this book)

 

 

Growing Up in Chinatown: The Life and Work of Edwar Lee. Moonbeam Tong Lee,Fong Brothers Printing, Inc., 1987. Biography of Edwar Lee, the first American-born Chinese Methodist minister, starts off describing the social and political climate before his birth in 1902, his personal accomplishments and work in the Church up to the age of 85 when this book was written by his wife. (Google this book)

 

Power in the City: Decision Making in San Francisco. Frederick M. Wirt, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974. 125 year political history of San Francisco providing insights on the politics of large American cities in the 1970s. (Google this book)

 

The San Franciscans. Niven Busch, New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1962. A novel of never-ending conflict on the battlefields of law and banking, between the dowered rich of San Franciscoand its ambitious poor. (Google this book)

 

 

Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West 1846-1906. Barbara Berglund, Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007. 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, providing snapshots of the micro-workings of power on five key cultural frontiers. (Google this book)

 

On Doing Time.  Morton Sobell, San Francisco, CA: Golden Gate National Parks Association, 2001.  This is the story of what led up to, and the conduct of the infamous trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobell who were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage where Sobell spent 5 of his 18 plus years of prison, in Alcatraz in the middle of San Francisco Bay. (Google this book)

 

San Francisco’s Lost Landmarks. James R. Smith, Sanger, CA: Word Dancer Press, 2005.  “With long-forgotten stories and evocative photographs, San Francisco's Lost Landmarks showcases the once-familiar sites that have faded into dim memories and hazy legends.” (Google this book)