A solid seller for over a decade, this dramatic account of San Francisco's 1906 earthquake and fire is updated with a contemporary cover. Over 400 on-the-scene photos provide a blow-by-blow account of the violent tremor and the three-day fire that followed, in which nearly 30,000 structures were destroyed and over a quarter million people left homeless."A fascinating book, and the pictures are magnificent." -Chicago Sunday Tribune

Illustrated with more than four hundred on-the-scene photographs, this is the definitive account of the 1906 earthquake and fire that devastated San Francisco. The Earth Shook, The Sky Burned tells the tragic story of the four days of upheaval and destruction that swept San Francisco when a violent earth tremor rocked the land, succeeded rapidly by a devastating fire that destroyed nearly thirty thousand buildings and left more than a quarter million people homeless. William Bronson’s blow-by-blow account is full of dramatic detail and includes a fascinating cast of characters, including Enrico Caruso, John Barrymore, and other turn of the century icons. A classic of San Francisco history, The Earth Shook, The Sky Burned reveals what really happened that April morning when the face of the city was changed forever.

On April 18, 1906, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake shook the San Francisco region, igniting fires that burned half the city. The disaster in all its elements — earthquake, fires, and recovery — profoundly disrupted the urban order and challenged San Francisco’s perceived permanence. The crisis temporarily broke down spatial divisions of class and race and highlighted the contested terrain of urban nature in an era of widespread class conflict, simmering ethnic tensions, and controversial reform efforts. From a proposal to expel Chinatown from the city center to a vision of San Francisco paved with concrete in the name of sanitation, the process of reconstruction involved reenvisioning the places of both people and nature. In their zeal to restore their city, San Franciscans downplayed the role of the earthquake and persisted in choosing patterns of development that exacerbated risk. In this close study of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Joanna L. Dyl examines the decades leading up to the catastrophic event and the city’s recovery from it. Combining urban environmental history and disaster studies, Seismic City demonstrates how the crisis and subsequent rebuilding reflect the dynamic interplay of natural and human influences that have shaped San Francisco.

Late nineteenth-century San Francisco was an ethnically diverse but male-dominated society bustling from a rowdy gold rush, earthquakes, and explosive economic growth. Within this booming marketplace, some women stepped beyond their roles as wives, caregivers, and homemakers to start businesses that combined family concerns with money-making activities. Edith Sparks traces the experiences of these women entrepreneurs, exploring who they were, why they started businesses, how they attracted customers and managed finances, and how they dealt with failure. Using a unique sample of bankruptcy records, credit reports, advertisements, city directories, census reports, and other sources, Sparks argues that women were competitive, economic actors, strategizing how best to capitalize on their skills in the marketplace. Their boardinghouses, restaurants, saloons, beauty shops, laundries, and clothing stores dotted the city's landscape. By the early twentieth century, however, technological advances, new preferences for name-brand goods, and competition from large-scale retailers constricted opportunities for women entrepreneurs at the same time that new opportunities for women with families drew them into other occupations. Sparks's analysis demonstrates that these businesswomen were intimately tied to the fortunes of the city over its first seventy years.

The twenty field trip guides in this volume represent the work of earthquake professionals from the earth science, engineering, and emergency management communities. The guides were developed to cross the boundaries between these professions, and thus reflect this diversity: trips focus on the built environment, the effects of the 1906 earthquake, the San Andreas fault, and other active faults in northern California.