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Pages of History
Hidden San Francisco: A Guide to Lost Landscapes, Unsung Heroes, and Radical Histories
by Chris Carlsson
list price $19.99
Hidden San Francisco peels back the layers of history to discover memories, echoes, and ghosts of the City’s storied past, often hiding in plain view. In Chris Carlsson's remarkable history from below, we meet the streetcar conductors, secretaries, ironworkers, labor organizers, dockworkers, musicians, cabbies and students that have shaped the City’s history. From farming to industry to towering offices, San Francisco's neighborhoods have been reinvented and reinhabited again and again. Behind old walls and gleaming glass facades lurk former industries, secret music and poetry venues, forgotten terrorist bombings, and much more...
The perfect guidebook for visitors and residents alike, Hidden San Francisco also features nine self-guided tours, with illustrated maps.
The Audio Walking Tour
To complement the book release we created a self-guided tour of 24 points of interest, mostly in the Mission District, related to essays in the book as read by the authors. Go to Foundsf.org to experience the book through the author's own voices.
Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-1978
Edited by Chris Carlsson with LisaRuth Elliott
list price $23.95 | 
Book details
A collection of first-person and historical essays spans the tumultuous decade from 1968, the year of the San Francisco State College strike, to 1978 and the twin traumas of the Jonestown massacre and the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. This volume provides a broad look at the diverse ways those ten years shook the City and shaped the world we live in today. From community gardening to environmental justice, gay rights and other identity-based social movements, anti-gentrification efforts, neighborhood arts programs and more, many of the initiatives whose origins are described here have taken root and spread far beyond San Francisco.
Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture
Edited by James Brook, Chris Carlsson & Nancy J. Peters
list price $23.95 | Book details
This book is—sadly—out of print!
A City Lights anthology, Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture is an anthology of fresh appraisals of the contrarian spirit of the city. The official story of San Francisco is one of progress, development, and growth. But there are other, unofficial, San Francisco stories, often shrouded in myth and in danger of being forgot-ten, and they are told here: stories of speculators and land-grabbers, immi-grants and minorities, sailors and waterfront workers, and poets, artists, and neighborhood activists.
Reclaiming San Francisco includes historians, geographers, poets, novelists, artists, art historians, photographers, journalists, citizen activists, an architect, and an anthropologist. Passionate about the city, they want San Francisco to be more itself and less like the city of office towers, chain stores, theme parks, and privatized public services and property that appears to be its immediate fate. San Francisco is not alone in being transformed according to the dictates of the global economy. But San Franciscans are unusual in their readiness to confront the corporate agenda for their city.
The Political Edge
Edited by Chris Carlsson
list price $18.95 Book details
In the wake of the astonishing popular mobilization on behalf of an underdog campaign to elect Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez mayor of San Francisco, The Political Edge analyzes emergent political energies, where they came from and where they're going. Rarely have contemporary radicals joined forces with cultural rebels and neighborhood activists in an effort to change almost everything about the governance of a city. Cultural and political trends erupt in San Francisco, a city that thrives on dissent and new ideas. With wit and cogency, this book reveals the new dynamics that will reshape urban politics nationwide. Chris Carlsson is an urban historian who has written and edited Critical Mass: Bicycling's Defiant Celebration, Bad Attitude: Processed World Reader and Reclaiming San Francisco.