Sometimes the coolest places are right outside your front door. Learning about San Francisco's interesting and unique culture has never been so super fun! Did you know that San Francisco was one of the most popular places to secure a fortune during the Gold Rush? Or that you can still visit Alcatraz, the country's most secure Federal prison, to this day? From the iconic Golden Gate Bridge, to the Mexican-American War, Super Cities!: San Francisco covers it all, and is sure to engage any reader with fun facts about the history, culture, and people who make this city great. Stroll along Pier 39, explore Chinatown, and try delicious chocolate at Ghirardelli Square, all right here. Take a peek inside to learn more about the impressive, unusual, super history of San Francisco!

What makes a place? Rebecca Solnit reinvents the traditional atlas, searching for layers of meaning & connections of experience across San Francisco.

As more and more people inhabit the Earth and live longer on it, Super Cities, will explode with populations of 20, 30, even 100 millions or more. But how will these cities accommodate such masses? Who will build them and where? How can they be sustained and their inhabitants provided for? Here, Jeff Dondero imagines the super cities of the future and explores the ways in which they can be sustainably built, how transportation will move masses of people without cars, how people will be fed and where waste will go, and how we will move to cities underground, under the sea, in the atmosphere, into space and on to other planets. It describes some of the smart systems for buildings and homes and some of the new ways food and materials enough for such masses will be supplied. Will super cities be the answer to our bursting population? And if they will, how can we best sustain and supply them? Dondero offers suggestions and a blueprint for the future.

How San Francisco became America's capital of sexual libertinism and a potent symbol in its culture wars

Since the landmark 1965 Supreme Court ruling Griswold v. Connecticut established a Constitutional right to privacy, the regulation of sexuality has become an extremely volatile area of American politics. From reproductive rights to sex education, pornography to gay marriage, the balance between community norms and individual autonomy has been fiercely contested. These and related subjects are often viewed in isolation, as though they were entirely separate issues. Yet as the documentary record makes clear, they are in fact closely interrelated, and their impact is cumulative. By addressing a broad array of topics at the intersection of sexuality and politics, this volume highlights the connections and makes an important contribution to a debate that touches every American. Taking as a starting point the 1965 Griswold decision—sometimes said to have launched the sexual revolution—the approximately 100 primary source documents assembled here either mark watersheds in themselves or are representative of a broad range of political developments. The documents are drawn from all quarters of U.S. political life. They include legislative texts; proposed laws and constitutional amendments; state and federal court rulings; political party platforms; and interest-group position statements.

A Stanford University Three Books Selection for 2019 “Essential.… A conflicted and complex portrait of a city starving for solutions.” —Brandon Yu, San Francisco Chronicle San Francisco is changing at warp speed. Famously home to artists and activists, and known as the birthplace of the Beats, the Black Panthers, and the LGBTQ movement, the Bay Area has been reshaped by Silicon Valley. The richer the region gets, the more unequal and less diverse it becomes, and cracks in the city’s facade—rapid gentrification, an epidemic of evictions, rising crime, atrophied public institutions—are growing wider. Inspired by Studs Terkel’s classic works of oral history, Cary McClelland spent years interviewing people at the epicenter of recent change, from venture capitalists and coders to politicians and protesters, capturing San Francisco as never before.