Accelerated global trade and mass immigration have brought rapid change to food culture in the United States over the past fifty years. San Francisco has been at the center of these changes. Bay Area restaurateurs Cecilia Chiang (The Mandarin) and her son Philip Chiang (P.F. Chang's), illustrate how Chinese food changed in the United States, moving out of historic Chinatowns and into the suburbs. David Brown's India House restaurant in San Francisco embodied the way Indian food was understood before the 1960s – interpreted through the lens of the British Empire. By the 2000s, Indian food had broken free of this colonial association and was available in its diverse regional variations – especially in the Bay Area suburbs fueled by the computer industry. These case studies all illustrate the impact of globalization and immigration on American food culture through the lens of San Francisco.

This article challenges the widely accepted view that cultural expressions of Germanness disappeared during World War I in the United States by examining the response of German restaurants to anti-German sentiments. German restaurants in San Francisco responded to the rise of anti-German sentiments in three distinct ways: First, some German restaurateurs veiled German cuisine as American cuisine, adding San Francisco specialties to the menu, and Americanizing the interior of the restaurant; Second, proprietors increasingly relied on non-Germans to decide the quality of the restaurant; Third, German restaurateurs founded new restaurants that openly continued the traditions of turn-of-the-century San Francisco German restaurants.

The unbuilt proposals for the 1939 San Francisco World's Fair offer a cross section of designs put before the public in a formative moment just before modernism came to dominate architectural discourse and production. Projects by luminaries Bernard Maybeck and Richard Neutra joined projects by Joseph Strauss and Henry Killam Murphy. Here were architectural hopefuls at the nadir of the Great Depression attempting to draw their way into the commission of a lifetime. Thus, a Beaux-Arts bohemian competed with a sincere modernist, a self-promoting engineer, and America's leading practitioner in China. At the same time, the proposals were part of the larger economic and political landscape of San Francisco, as neighborhood associations and politicians used them to attract the fair to their part of the city. More than pie in the sky, these designs show in amplified form the way architecture is embedded in public discourse as a form of persuasion, a kind of politics by other means through which elites and other stakeholders argued for their preferred reality. As tools of intra-urban boosterism, these plans reveal the competing interests within San Francisco at a pivotal moment in its development, when its future lay in the formation of a regional metropolis that could compete with Los Angeles for commerce on the West Coast and beyond.

Seeking to divorce California from its rough and tumble Gold Rush–era image of lawlessness and barbarity, turn-of-the-century Californians capitalized on the state's climate, soil, and relatively open landscapes to try to create businesses and a society that promoted messages of California as a cultured space. Drawing on increased commercial possibilities created by the completion of the transcontinental railroad and later the Panama Canal, many of these California companies focused on their connectedness to the middle and eastern portions of the nation as well as their European roots. For some, a range of ethnic, native, and foreign plants demonstrated the fecundity of the space and the civilized cosmopolitanism of the state. Others focused on specific blooms; by examining this phenomenon within seed company C. C. Morse & Co. and through the work of its employees—including Chinese immigrant cousins Wong Ah Hem and Henry Ohn—the sweet pea emerges as the perfect flower to explore the efforts of those crafting their narrative of California as a blossom routinely drenched in British whiteness.

In late 1945, a group of outraged citizens in the small city of El Cerrito formed a “Good Government League” to challenge the gambling and liquor interests who controlled City Hall. In the next few years the League achieved all of its agenda: a city manager plan, civil service reform, and the end of wide-open gambling. A movement like this was fairly typical of the Progressive Era. But the city in question was not a turn-of-the-century metropolis like New York or Chicago. These events happened in the late 1940s in a small bedroom community located just to the north of Berkeley. Within a few years, El Cerrito transformed its reputation from “Little Reno” to the squeaky-clean “City of Homes.” As a case study, the El Cerrito story is interesting for a number of reasons. Most importantly, it highlights how development in the San Francisco Bay Area has involved a regional periodization that differs from what we might traditionally associate with suburban growth. The city's Old West heritage was a major source of political conflict, while the activism of the city's new middle class contrasts with what sociologists called the politically quiescent “Organization Men” of the era's “Lonely Crowd.” The El Cerrito experience also lends insight into why the Bay Area has remained politically liberal since 1945. The city's reformers embraced much of the language and platform of the turn-of-the-century progressives. But they also lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War, and desired most of all to make public policy that would ensure economic security and equal opportunity. Their emphasis on an active public sector left a legacy that can still be felt today.

Now part of a 15,100-acre restoration project, the salt ponds of the southern San Francisco Bay have a long history of industrial use and management. Early developers of these lands in the late 1800s modified the marshy tidal margin of the bay to be productive and profitable; wetlands were not valued for their own sake or for ecological values, but were considered wastelands until they could be “improved” for human utilization. The land barons behind what became the Leslie Salt Company created an elaborate landscape of dikes and ponds, but producing solar salt was considered an interim use, while the owners aimed for further, more lucrative possibilities: first planning a heavily industrialized manufacturing and distribution center, and later considering filling the marshlands to create residential developments. Ironically the vision of a filled-in Bay helped to trigger a wave of environmentalism in the 1960s and ‘70s, resulting first in the creation of a wildlife refuge and later this ambitious restoration project, circling back toward the tidal marshes’ earlier form and function. Examining their history helps us to see not only the potential conservation value of lands previously used for industrial purposes, but also to help us understand that we can live side by side with conservation lands, that their ecological or wildness values are not necessarily diminished by human presence or past.

Spotting a sea turtle or Galapagos tortoise on the early wharfs and streets of San Francisco or Sacramento, California during the Gold Rush (1848-1855) would not have been a rare event. Massive population influx into the San Francisco Bay region during this time resulted in substantial impacts to native species and habitats of all taxa, but the demand for food resulted in many resources, turtles and tortoises included, being imported into the cities. Providing a fresh and delectable food source, these terrapin were brought to San Francisco and Sacramento to feed the hungry Gold Rush populous. Their taste, popularity and demand also resulted in small numbers being imported into gold mining towns in the San Joaquin Valley and foothills of the Sierra Nevada’s. Remarkable as this process was, the consumption and importation of both sea turtles and Galapagos tortoises during the Gold Rush pushed native populations of these species to the brink of extinction during the mid to late-nineteenth century. Declining numbers of terrapin and increased scientific curiosity, with a desire to safeguard these creatures for future generations, resulted in their eventually legal protection and conservation. In many ways the impacts of the decimation of terrapin in the eastern Pacific during the Gold Rush are still felt today, as conservation and breeding efforts continue in an attempt to return native turtle and tortoise populations to pre-Euro-American contact levels. This research describes the historical, and new archaeofaunal, evidence of the terrapin import market in San Francisco, Sacramento and beyond during the dynamic period of the California Gold Rush.

In 1959, Arthur Fletcher—a former professional football player and mid-level Kansas politician—moved to California. He was down on his luck, and things soon went from bad to worse. He made few inroads in Sacramento as the conservatives of his Republican party—including racist John Birchers—marginalized liberals and moderates. He suffered personal tragedy: his wife committed suicide, jumping off the Bay Bridge. Fletcher now found himself a single parent in a Berkeley housing project. As far as he had come from childhood poverty in segregated Junction City, Kansas, Fletcher was back to square one. But he had an incredible tenacity and drive—and more than a few political connections. He resolved to use politics to improve the lot of his fellow man, especially the black man. He took a job as a teacher in an inner-city special needs program, funded by the War on Poverty, and ran for state assembly. Fletcher did well in the race—for a Republican—but lost. He moved to Pasco, Washington, founding a black self-help group and winning a city council seat. This brought the attention of Richard Nixon, who in 1968 was looking for a civil rights program that jibed with the Republican Party’s corporatist ethos. President Nixon appointed Fletcher to the Labor Department, where he implemented the Revised Philadelphia Plan, earning himself the title "father of affirmative action." Fletcher’s experience was hardly typical of civil rights leaders. He preferred to work inside the system, with all the acceptance of it that that implied. But he knew what life was like in the ghetto, and resolved to put his insider’s skills to the task of undermining the very system he served. His years in California, which proved the most trying of his life, were formative, and are the subject of this paper.

The author, Executive Director of the California Historical Society, surveys the work of Stephen W. Jacobs.

The author surveys the work of Hart H. North.