FRS 003 — Sec. 009 — (1 unit) — CRN 92640 — T 9:00-10:20am — 104 Sproul
San Francisco Earthquake of 1906—Rethinking Causes and Consequences

Instructor: Dennis Dingemans, Social Sciences Program, College of Letters & Science

Description: This course will coincide with the 100th anniversary of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Some half-dozen new books are using this centennial as the incentive for re-stating and revising our understanding of what happened before, during, and after that greatest natural disaster to strike a major American city. This course will read and discuss the most notable of these books (Philip Fradkin’s The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself, University of California Press, 2005), a book that emphasizes the city’s own public policy contributions to the quake’s devastating impacts and to the remarkable recovery in the decade that followed. The class discussions will put the San Francisco destruction in the perspective of other catastrophic events (the Chicago fire, the New Orleans flood, the Los Angeles quake), will examine the controversy over how much the week of fires after April 18th contributed (and many have argued that city leaders down-played the quake’s effects), and will contemplate the effects of massive rebuilding on San Francisco’s famously attractive urban landscapes. We will be holding one of our class sessions of the very date (April 18) of the quake and we will have three Saturday field trip opportunities for students to join the course instructor in examining first hand the sites associated with the 1906 quake/fire destruction and subsequent rebuilding. The field trip opportunities will come on subsequent Saturdays (April 15, April 22, and April 29) and there will be space for students to select a Saturday that fits their schedule. In the city itself, we will drive by UCD vehicle to the Van Ness and Mission District boundaries of the fire’s progress and then we will walk between the eastern slopes (and summit) of Telegraph Hill to Nob Hill and the South of Market edge of today’s thriving downtown. Students will learn or review the details of an important event that has been subject to much misrepresentation by city propagandists who wanted to minimize the perception of a threat of repeated earthquakes. The field trip experience will be an opportunity to explore the pedestrian-friendly qualities that make San Francisco one of our country’s most walk-able central city landscapes and an opportunity to use detective skills in reading the landscape to see first-hand the geography of pre-quake surviving structures. Students will be introduced to today’s lively scholarly emphasis on urban environmental history, including the assertion that public policy has such strong consequences that we all understand how little it is true anymore that “geography is destiny.”

Format: Attend seminar discussions Tuesdays (4) in April (2:40 to 4:00) in 104 Sproul. Attend one of three Saturday field trips in April (15th, 22nd, or 29th). No class meetings after the April month of the quake. Field trips will leave UCD around 9 and return by 6 (we will travel with a university van). All will read the Fradkin book (with chapters assigned for each of the four weekly meetings in April). Grading: Half the grade will be based on contributions to classroom and field trip discussions of the book and the quake event. A second half of the grade will be based on two three-page short-essay critical commentaries on a pair of book chapters.

About the Instructor: Professor Dingemans received his undergraduate degree (in European History) at the University of Chicago and his graduate degrees (MA & PhD in Geography) at the University of California at Berkeley. He has traveled widely in Europe and has taught regional geography courses at UCD since 1972. His courses are often taken by UCD's International Relations students.