Adolph Sutro was forever seeking challenges. Emigrating from Prussia to the U.S. at age 20, the California gold rush lured him west. At the Comstock Lode in Nevada, he conceived an idea for a tunnel to drain the hot water that made the mines perilous and inefficient. But he would have to overcome both physical obstacles and powerful opposition by the Bank of California to realize his vision. Back in San Francisco, Sutro bought one twelfth of the city, including the famous Cliff House perched over the Pacific Ocean. When it burned to cinders on Christmas Day, 1894, he built a massive, eight-story Victorian replacement. He used his expertise in tunneling and water solutions to create the world's largest enclosed swimming structure, the Sutro Baths--six glass-covered heated saltwater pools with capacity of 1,000 swimmers. Other challenges followed but Sutro was not invincible. After a two-year term as mayor of San Francisco, he succumbed to debilitating strokes which left him senile. His death in 1898 started disputes among his heirs--six children by his wife and two by his mistress--that lasted more than a decade.

History of the various buildings known as the Cliff House, in photographs.

The history of this fabled site spans 150 years, beginning in

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.

San Francisco is a patchwork of unique neighborhoods, and one of the most distinctive is the Richmond District. Stretching from the city's dense urban core outward to the rocky, rugged cliffs of Land's End, the Richmond contains schools, shops, churches, hospitals, and citizens from many different backgrounds and countries. San Francisco historian and tour guide Lorri Ungaretti, author of San Francisco's Sunset District, showcases here a stirring collection of vintage Richmond images, detailing this district's journey from windswept sand dunes to the modern and livable place we know today. Among the Richmond's long-gone sights are cemeteries, farms, racetracks, and improvised cottages built in the wake of the 1906 earthquake. The area remained mostly rural through the 1880s, when mining entrepreneur Adolph Sutro (who also developed Sutro Heights and Sutro Baths) put in a commuter rail line to connect San Francisco's central district with his entertainment destinations in the "Outside Lands" near Ocean Beach. The Richmond District's history includes large cemetery plots that are now covered with homes. In addition, the various roadhouses, racetracks, and amusement parks in the area made it what Ungaretti calls "the city's playground." They're gone now, but remain important parts of the Richmond's fascinating history.

Migration on the Move examines the dynamics of migration and asylum law over the past two decades and highlights profound changes that have taken place in these fields as a result of growing EU competences to deal with migration and asylum questions. The book maps the transformation of the migration field by focusing on three interrelated issues: the effects of Europeanization and the shifting power relations that it implies; placing Europe’s laws and policies in a global migration context, and critically examining to whom ‘project’ Europe belongs. The contributors offer a multidisciplinary analysis of key aspects of the migration and refugee crisis and their implications for policies, principles of law, and the treatment of people in Europe today.

William Sharon was one of the most colorful scoundrels in the nineteenth-century mining West. He epitomized the robber barons of the nation’s Gilded Age and the political corruption and moral decay for which that period remains notorious; yet he was also a visionary capitalist who controlled more than a dozen of the greatest mines on Nevada’s mighty Comstock Lode, built the Virginia & Truckee Railroad, manipulated speculation and prices on the San Francisco Stock Exchange, and revived the collapsed Bank of California. One enemy called him “a thoroughly bad man—a man entirely void of principle,” while a Comstock neighbor called him “one of the best men that ever lived in Virginia City.” Both descriptions were reasonably accurate. In this first-ever biography of one of Nevada’s most reviled historical figures, author Michael Makley examines Sharon’s complex nature and the turbulent times in which he flourished. Arriving in San Francisco shortly after the Gold Rush began, Sharon was soon involved in real estate, politics, banking, and stock speculation, and he was a party in several of the era’s most shocking business and sexual scandals. When he moved to Virginia City, Nevada’s mushrooming silver boomtown, his business dealings there soon made him known as the “King of the Comstock.” Makley’s engaging and meticulously researched account not only lays bare the life of the notorious but enigmatic Sharon but examines the broader historical context of his career—the complex business relationships between San Francisco and the booming gold and silver mining camps of the Far West; the machinations of rampant Gilded Age capitalism; and the sophisticated financial and technological infrastructure that supported Virginia City’s boomtown economy. The Infamous King of the Comstock offers a significant fresh perspective on Nevada and the mining West.

With long-forgotten stories and evocative photographs, San Francisco's Lost Landmarks showcases the once-familiar sites that have faded into dim memories and hazy legends. Not just a list of places, facts, and dates, this pictorial history shows why San Francisco has been a legendary travel destination and one of the world's premier places to live and work for more than one hundred and fifty years. It not only tells of the lost landmarks, but also dishes up the flavour of what it was like to experience these past treasures.