In This Issue

SAN FRANCISCO'S POPULATION turns over so fast that it sometimes seems as if everyone you meet is from somewhere else – and half of them haven't been here more than a few years. Even serious, committed political activists often have little or no sense of the city's past.

There are people trying to change that – Chris Carlsson and the Shaping San Francisco project (www.shapingsf.org), for example – but overall, for a city that has hosted some of the most important events and given birth to some of the most important trends in our nation's history, there's a remarkable lack of connection to the past.

Our first annual history issue is an attempt to start making those links. Every year we're going to look at a decade in San Francisco history; eventually, we'll have a great historical section on sfbg.com.

We chose the 1950s for our inaugural project because it's such a fascinating period in San Francisco. The nation was going through postwar conservatism and cold war repression – but as David Halberstam points out in his book The Fifties, the seeds of a lot of social movements were just starting to sprout. And nowhere was that more true than in San Francisco.

While much of the rest of the country was settling into suburban quiet, San Francisco was in foment. The beat movement was shaking up culture; the lesbian and gay movement was becoming a political force; the urban environmental and antinuclear movements were coming to life; activists were fighting McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee; a multicultural civil rights movement was emerging. And many of the things that were happening here would soon spread nationwide.

We pretty much defined the '50s as the actual decade, 1950 through 1959, with a few incursions into the early '60s. If you define that era a little more loosely (I like to say the '50s started in 1952 and lasted until 1963), then there's another local trend worth noting: the emergence of the alternative press.

The Village Voice was founded in New York City in 1955, but there wasn't anything else like it in the country. In 1963, Bruce B. Brugmann and Jean Dibble, who were then in Milwaukee, decided to start a weekly newspaper and concluded that San Francisco was the place to do it. Three years later the Bay Guardian helped launch the alternative press in America. (Of course, by then it was the '60s....)