Levi Strauss, A.L. Gump, Yehudi Menuhin, Gertrude Stein, Adolph Sutro, Congresswoman Florence Prag Kahn--Jewish people have been so enmeshed in life in and around San Francisco that their story is a chronicle of the metropolis itself. Since the Gold Rush, Bay Area Jews have countered stereotypes, working as farmers and miners, boxers and mountaineers. They were Gold Rush pioneers, Gilded Age tycoons, and Progressive Era reformers. Told through an astonishing range of characters and events, Cosmopolitans illuminates many aspects of Jewish life in the area: the high profile of Jewish women, extraordinary achievements in the business world, the cultural creativity of the second generation, the bitter debate about the proper response to the Holocaust and Zionism, and much more. Focusing in rich detail on the first hundred years after the Gold Rush, the book also takes the story up to the present day, demonstrating how unusually strong affinities for the arts and for the struggle for social justice have characterized this community even as it has changed over time. Cosmopolitans, set in the uncommonly diverse Bay Area, is a truly unique chapter of the Jewish experience in America.

Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology is a collection of classic articles by some of the best known proponents of oral history, demonstrating the basics of oral history, while also acting as a guidebook for how to use it in research. Added to this new edition is insight into how oral history is practiced on an international scale, making this book an indispensable resource for scholars of history and social sciences, as well as those interested in oral history on the avocational level. This volume is a reprint of the 1984 edition, with the added bonus of a new introduction by David Dunaway and a new section on how oral history is practiced on an international scale. Selections from the original volume trace the origins of oral history in the United States, provide insights on methodology and interpretation, and review the various approaches to oral history used by folklorists, historians, anthropologists, and librarians, among others. Family and ethnic historians will find chapters addressing the applications of oral history in those fields.

“Leta Miller’s long-awaited study is a tightly woven, fast-paced, and luminous chronicle of San Francisco’s musical coming of age. Her keen insights into Chinese opera, night club jazz, and two international expositions go far to rekindle the era’s spirited mix of talent, taste, patronage, and politics. The groundbreaking work of an accomplished music and social historian, Music and Politics in San Francisco is a most welcome companion to Catherine Parsons Smith’s Making Music in Los Angeles.” —Jonathan Elkus, Lecturer in Music Emeritus, UC Davis “From three disastrous days in April 1906 through the onset of an even greater disaster in 1941, from the San Francisco Conservatory through the performances of the Chinese Opera, Leta Miller traces the musico-political history of ‘the Paris of the West’ in meticulous detail. This important book adds immeasurably to our knowledge of West Coast American music, whilst simultaneously challenging a number of historiographical shibboleths.” —David Nicholls, contributing editor of The Cambridge History of American Music "Leta Miller’s San Francisco’s Musical Life is a pure pleasure to read. Miller manages that rare feat of digesting what must have been many years of digging through newspapers and archives into a fun, lively, highly readable narrative. Each chapter strikes a comfortable balance among factual exposition, colorful anecdote, and historical analysis. Miller brings equal depth and insight to each of her disparate subjects, she writes with charm and clarity throughout, and the whole is arranged in a way that is clear and logical, never monotonous." —Mary Ann Smart, author of Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera