The San Francisco Irish 1848-1880 (Paperback)

In this vivid social history R. A. Burchell follows the Irish who crossed not only the Atlantic but an entire continent to make a new kind of urban life in Gold Rush California. The San Francisco Irish 1848-1880 overturns East Coast narratives of entrenched nativism to show how a city without an inherited ruling class--exploding from fewer than a thousand residents to a quarter million in three decades--opened political economic and ecclesiastical space to newcomers. Drawing on census manuscripts city directories newspapers and institutional records Burchell reconstructs a community that by 1880 comprised roughly a third of San Francisco s inhabitants with Catholicism the city s largest denomination. He tracks the rise of Irish financiers and builders (the Donahues) the founding of banks and orphanages and early victories at the ballot box--from Frank McCoppin s mayoralty to Eugene Casserly s seat in the U.S. Senate--arguing that California s compressed improvisational urbanization blunted older hierarchies and recast ethnic power. Burchell does not romanticize. Against the major theme of mobility and opportunity runs a persistent minor key: structural inequality the burdens of poverty and disease and the familiar if muted suspicions attached to Catholic allegiance. By juxtaposing riot-scarred Boston and Philadelphia with San Francisco s cross-confessional live and let live ethos he explains both the city s unusual tolerance and the limits of that tolerance. The result is a finely grained account of how Irish migrants fashioned institutions leveraged patronage and settled permanently--evident in lengthening residence patterns--within a volatile extractive economy driven by gold railroads and Nevada silver. A model case study in immigrant urban history The San Francisco Irish reframes the nineteenth-century American city from the Pacific slope where the absence of a long past made the future for a time radically negotiable. This title is part of UC Press s Voices Revived program which commemorates University of California Press s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice reach and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893 Voices Revived makes high-quality peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.