The San Francisco Irish, 1848-1880

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 man...