flâneur

Berkeley, California

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I spent January 2025 in San Francisco, and went to the East Bay about a dozen times. I have a few colleagues at Cal, my wonderful girlfriend went there, and the campus looms large in America’s cultural memory. The town holds separate interest historically and towards contemporary culture and politics. This post is a sketch of the history of Berkeley, with some notes of deeper interest at the end. Some books which were particularly helpful or interesting: Wollenberg, Berkeley: A City In History, Margolin, Ohlone Way, ed. McCardle, Exactly Opposite the Golden Gate, and a few hours in Pegasus Books on Shattuck Avenue. Berkeley’s history as an English-speaking community goes back 160 years, two modern American lifetimes. Before that, it was a corner of the domain of a Spanish settler, and before that it was Ohlone land, maintained and cultivated and lived off by a native nation. Humans arrived perhaps five thousand years ago, and the geography would have been much the same. The first outsi

Berkeley, California January 29, 2025 I spent January 2025 in San Francisco, and went to the East Bay about a dozen times. I have a few colleagues at Cal, my wonderful girlfriend went there, and the campus looms large in America’s cultural memory. The town holds separate interest historically and towards contemporary culture and politics. This post is a sketch of the history of Berkeley, with some notes of deeper interest at the end. Some books which were particularly helpful or interesting: Wollenberg, Berkeley: A City In History , Margolin, Ohlone Way , ed. McCardle, Exactly Opposite the Gol

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