Exploring the Bay Area

Mission Dolores

Founded in Yelamu territory in June, 1776, Mission San Francisco de Assisi came to be known as Mission Dolores after the Spanish-named lagoon that existed nearby. One year after mission settlement, one Yelamu man and two boys became the first of over 5,000 native people baptized at the mission. They composed a multilingual and multiethnic population which spoke dialects of Costanoan, Miwok, Pomo, Patwin, and Yokuts languages. The current curator at the mission, Andrew Galvan, is the only native descendant of Christian Indians to hold a high office in one of California ’s former missions today. The mission’s workshops, fields, orchards, pastures, and dwelling places disappeared together with the many streams that ran nearby. Now placed underground, some of these streams resurfaced with the 1906 quake, but the mission withstood it with relatively little damage. Standing in its original form, neither extensively restored nor rebuilt, it remains the oldest building in the city. The mission cemetery, however, better represents the Spanish, Mexican, Irish, and other nineteenth-century settlers than the thousands of native people originally buried there. Reconstructed when the city removed the dead from here and other urban cemeteries to Colma, south of San Francisco , it may be best known as a site from Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Vertigo. The buildings in the surrounding Mission District offer clues to the different historical eras that have defined what remains one of city’s most vibrant neighborhoods.

Alcatraz

Named Isla de los Alcatraces (Island of the Pelicans) by the eighteenth-century Spanish explorer Juan Manuel de Ayala, Alcatraz has always been a rugged rock, attractive to sea birds. When California became a state in 1850, President Millard Fillmore reserved Alcatraz for military use. The army built a fort on Alcatraz and placed 111 cannons inside its sturdy brick walls. The fort received its first active duty personnel in 1859 when Captain Joseph Stewart arrived with Company H, Third U.S. Artillery. Though designed as a fort, Alcatraz received prisoners from its earliest occupation by the government. Captain Stewart jailed eleven of his own men and soon received other prisoners, including prisoners thought sympathetic to the South. Alcatraz became an official military prison in 1861. The government imprisoned Native Americans on Alcatraz . In 1915, the government renamed Alcatraz the “Pacific Branch, U.S. Disciplinary Barracks.” The army left the island in 1933 and the Department of Justice reopened Alcatraz as a federal penitentiary a year later. By 1963, the Department of Justice calculated it could house federal prisoners more cheaply in its Marion , Illinois , facility. Alcatraz closed. Native Americans briefly occupied Alcatraz in 1964, demanding the use of the island for a cultural center and an Indian university. When a larger force of Indian people returned to the Island on November 9, 1969, those occupiers made similar demands.

On June 10, 1971 an armed federal force ousted the few Native Americans still on Alcatraz . Today the island is open to tourists, who can tour the remaining facilities and hear an oral history presentation prepared by the National Park Service. <http://www.nps.gov/alcatraz>.

The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender (GLBT) Historical Society

Founded in 1985, the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society maintains extensive archives housing hundreds of manuscript collections, thousands of periodical titles, tens of thousands of photographs, and hundreds of thousands of ephemeral items. Among the collections in the archives are the papers of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, the founders of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian rights group; records of the Society for Individual Rights, the S.F.-based gay rights organization that was for a time the largest such organization in the U.S.; the papers of Elsa Gidlow, lesbian poet; the papers of Jose Sarria, drag artist and gay rights activist; the Willie Walker Erotic Collection, which includes thousands of items dating from the 1920s to the present; the photographs of Robert Pruzan and Crawford Barton, whose work documents the vivid queer scene in San Francisco in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These materials are made available to researchers and exhibit curators. For more information about the exhibit underway at the time of the OAH meeting, go to <http://www.glbthistory.org>.

Bancroft Library

Although the Bancroft Library officially dates from 1905 when the University of California acquired Hubert Howe Bancroft’s personal library, it was actually born some forty-two years earlier, when Bancroft discovered seventy-five volumes pertaining to California and the West on the shelves of his own San Francisco bookstore. Suddenly bitten by the collecting bug, he began accumulating works on the history of the entire Trans-Mississippi West, extending from Alaska to Central America . Bancroft saw his collection as history awaiting an author. Unable to find scholars willing to tackle his massive accumulation of books and manuscripts, Bancroft elected to write it himself, with the aid of a staff of interviewers, transcribers, and writers. Bancroft’s history project was completed in 1894. Realizing the value to posterity of his collection, he sought a permanent home for it, eventually selling it for a fraction of its value to the University of California , with the provision that it be maintained as a separate library, and that the core collection be added to over time. First housed in the attic of California Hall, and then in the Doe Library, the Bancroft Library moved into its present quarters in 1973. The Bancroft Library now includes the Mark Twain Papers and Project, the Regional Oral History Office, the University of California Archives , the History of Science and Technology Program, and the Pictorial Collection. It has become one of the largest&emdash;and busiest&emdash;special collections in the United States .

Oakland Museum of California

What makes California what it is? Explore that question in the Cowell Hall of California History in the permanent exhibition “ California : A Place , A People, A Dream.” Meet the people who have shaped California &emdash;natives, adventurers, wealth-seekers, health-seekers, colonists, settlers, newcomers, old-timers, sun-worshippers, reformers, upper class to underclass&emdash;people of all colors&emdash;and the dreams they have pursued. Explore the forces that have shaped California&emdash;the environment, the Gold Rush, earthquakes, wartime, the computer chip, Hollywood, the automobile, social and political protest, countercultures, discrimination, leisure and benevolent climate, freedom, and opportunity. Encounter the objects that tell this history. They are the tangible part of the story of how California became what it is, for history did not begin with the printed or even the written word. The history of California does not date from the arrival of the first European and the written reports of explorers and friars, but from eons earlier in the tales told by ancient storytellers around tribal campfires.

The San Francisco African American  Historical and Cultural Society

The San Francisco African American Historical and Cultural Society has been the leading institution of its kind in the Bay Area since its founding in 1955. Indeed, it evolved out of the first such institution west of the Mississippi , tracing its lineage back to the 1850s. In 1958, the group’s modern incarnation merged with the local chapter of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History and began its sponsorship of the local celebration of what has evolved into Black History Month. Since its founding, the society has been at the forefront of local efforts to document, preserve, and represent local, national and global dimensions of the African American experience. In particular, the society’s enduring mission has been to empower San Francisco’s African American community by: establishing and maintaining an educational and research institution devoted to documenting, preserving and providing access to accurate accounts of the history of African Americans in San Francisco and the history of San Francisco from an African American perspective; providing a forum for the analysis and discussion of local, national and international issues from an African American perspective; promoting the study and appreciation of African American history and culture; and, providing exhibits and programs designed to educate African Americans of all ages about their history and to instill in them a sense of pride and respect for themselves and their heritage. Equally important and noteworthy have been the society’s continuing efforts to reach out to diverse local, national and international communities, disseminating knowledge regarding local and regional African American history and culture and promoting interracial and intercultural cooperation and understanding.

The Presidio

First established in July 1776, on Yelamu land by less than seventy-five settlers, including the wives, children, and relatives of soldiers, the presidio or military outpost stands three miles northwest of Mission Dolores. Built as a palisade enclosed fort to secure Spanish land claims through the settlement of northern missions and the town of San José , and to halt Russian expansion, it covers a large area on the south shore of the Golden Gate channel. Extensive archeological excavations currently underway have begun to reveal the indigenous, colonial, and Mexican history of the area. When the United States took possession of San Francisco at the beginning of the Mexican-American war in l846, the Presidio became a crucial staging ground for troops involved in U.S. expansion and war in the Pacific and Latin America .

The Presidio grounds originally encompassed 1,400 acres, and the pine and eucalyptus trees planted during the l880s still form one of the most beautiful wooded areas in the city. Decommissioned as a military base during the 1990s, the site is now part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area with an impressive garden of native plants at Crissy Field, restored sand dunes, Fort Point, and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. Fort Point, built between l853 and l861 to protect the city from sea attacks, constitutes an interesting four-story vaulted building now nestled under the Golden Gate bridge, where children perform historic reenactments of the Civil War. The California Palace of the Legion of Honor, an art museum built in 1916, holds a collection of European art and offers excellent special exhibits, beautiful grounds, and a lovely café.

The Chinese Historical Society

Founded in 1963, the Chinese Historical Society is the oldest and largest organization in the United States dedicated to Chinese American History. It changed locations within San Francisco Chinatown until it settled in the historic YWCA designed by Julia Morgan. Chinese American women helped establish the YWCA in Chinatown in 1916; they composed all but one member of the board by 1929, and led the organization with a bilingual staff after 1932. The YWCA ran a broad range of programs by and for the community, a function the Chinese Historical Society also plays, in addition to the society’s focus on Chinese American history at the national level. The historical society is allied to San Francisco State University ’s Asian American Studies program. It sponsors forums, and holds book talks and other cultural and intellectual events, as well as offering guided tours of Chinatown .

San Francisco Public Library

The San Francisco Public Library celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2004. The Main Library branch of the Public Library is the resource center for the entire San Francisco Public Library system and the libraries of Northern California . Its large collection and extensive programs and exhibits support the library’s mission of “access to information, knowledge, independent learning and the joy of reading.” During the OAH meeting, the library will host two new exhibits&emdash;“Sleeping Beauties: Fairy Tales selected from the Schmulowitz Collection of Wit and Humor,” highlighting the theme of fairy tales from around the world, and “Stories of the City,” which documents the community living in and around several Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels in San Francisco.