| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 40.1

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 40.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846–1906. By Barbara Berglund. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. xvii + 294 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95.)

San Francisco's primacy among western cities has produced a vast literature about its colorful past and its regional significance. This book is a welcome addition because the author has unearthed some choice nuggets of the city's post-gold-rush history in the under-studied decades prior to the 1906 earthquake. Berglund focuses on public commercial spaces such as restaurants, boardinghouses, saloons, bordellos, dance halls, gardens, museums, expositions, and fairs, as well as more familiar landmarks such as the Palace Hotel, Chinatown, and the Barbary Coast. Her thesis is that commercial spaces in San Francisco were "cultural frontiers" of human interaction where the city slowly shed its unsettled and cosmopolitan past for a more stable and more typically "American" social hierarchy. And yet Berglund also wants to subvert that narrative by showing that women, workers, immigrants, and non-whites contested every effort by hegemonic white-male elites to marginalize or demean them.

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