The Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, The Urban and Social Policy Concentration at the School of International and Public Affairs, and the Department of History, Columbia University, present
Book Panel: “San Francisco Year Zero: Political Upheaval, Punk Rock, and a Third-Place Baseball Team” (New Brunswick: NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019)
Lincoln Mitchell, Author
Research Scholar, Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University
Frank Guridy
Associate Professor of History and of African American and African Diaspora Studies
Department of History, Columbia University
Jennifer Blowdryer
Author, Journalist, Filmaker, Musician, Actress
Moderated by Ester R. Fuchs
Professor, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
Abstract
“Lincoln Mitchell presents a new and brilliant understanding of San Francisco, America’s most progressive city, by describing and interpreting its culture through the extraordinary prism of politics, baseball, and the punk rock scene in the seventies.” – Art Agnos, Mayor of San Francisco, 1988-1991
San Francisco Year Zero is the story of San Francisco in 1978, as well as an exploration of how the San Francisco of today, a city of deep contradictions, came into being. San Francisco is now one of the most socially liberal cities in America, but it also has some of the nation’s worst income inequality. It is a playground for tech millionaires, with an outrageously high cost of living, yet it also supports vibrant alternative and avant-garde scenes. So how did the city get this way? Lincoln Mitchell traces the roots of the current situation back to 1978, when three key events occurred: the assassination of George Moscone and Harvey Milk occurring fewer than two weeks after the massacre of Peoples Temple members in Jonestown, Guyana; the explosion of the city’s punk rock scene; and a breakthrough season for the San Francisco Giants. Through these three strands, Lincoln Mitchell explores the rifts between the city’s pro-business and progressive-left politicians, the emergence of Dianne Feinstein as a political powerhouse, the increasing prominence of the city’s LGBT community, punk’s reinvigoration of the Bay Area’s radical cultural politics, and the ways that the Giants helped unify one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse cities in the nation. Written from an insider’s perspective, San Francisco Year Zero deftly weaves together the personal and the political, putting a human face on the social upheavals that transformed the City by the Bay.
