The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900

This history of San Francisco from 1850 through 1900 identifies the active participation of citizens in communication, persuasion, and mobilization as the public city: the site of American political and social change. Challenging decades of scholarship that treats urban politics as the expression of social-group experience and power, the author develops the opposite thesis that social-group identities of race, class, ethnicity, and gender were politically constructed in the public sphere in the process of mobilization and journalistic discourse,