Re-imagining the City of San Francisco, 1905-1915

Drawing upon original source material from the collections of the Donohue Rare Book Room, the exhibition presents artifacts of the earthquake and fire of 1906 in the context of "re-imagining" the City. Beginning with the Burnham Plan’s architectural vision for a redesigned San Francisco and concluding with the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 in which San Francisco announced its comeback to the world, the exhibition considers the earthquake and fire not as a single catastrophic event but as one component in a greater period of imagining, rebuilding, and re-conceiving the City.

Charles Fracchia, a faculty member in the University’s Fromm Institute and noted authority on San Francisco history, presented a lecture: "The Historiography of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire" on Thursday, April 6th at 6:00 p.m. in the Donohue Rare Book Room.

Listen to the lecture: AAC format (28.2 mb, iTunes, QuickTime) mp3 format (68.5 mb)

Historical images of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire from the Donohue Rare Book Room. Slide show created by Rebecca Simon. Watch the slide show: WMV format (34.11 mb)

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