Eye From the Edge — Llamas, Ruben, 1937- — A real American memoir of mid-20th Century, West Oakland, California. A rare glimpse into urban adventures, immigrant challenges and musical culture. An easy and interesting read for all ages.
The Edge of Fruitvale — Oakland Public Library
The Edge of Fruitvale — DaCosta, Rohan, — Poetry, prose, and photographs.
Crossroads — Oakland Public Library
Crossroads — A collage of drawings, photographs, historical footage, interviews and location shooting, this documentary reconstructs the transformation of West Oakland from a pasture land to a port of entry for African Americans from the South. While job opportunities caused mass migration of ethnic groups to the area around the Second World War, the film also shows the population decline in West Oakland after the building of the Cypress Freeway and, later, BART. Southern Pacific Railroad's contribution to the development of the area is highlighted.
The Water’s Edge: Empire, Race, and the Global History of Oakland, California, 1848-1980
Author(s): Klein, Andrew Nelson Carver | Advisor(s): Kelley, Robin D.G. | Abstract: This dissertation explores historical intersections between capitalism, race-making, environmental change, and U.S. foreign relations from the vantage of Oakland’s waterfront. It tracks the evolution of this geostrategic coastline since it emerged as a coal-powered nexus of railroads, steamships, and military installations during American colonization. Revising the story of Oakland’s development from a global perspective, my project documents how local boosters, businessmen, and bureaucrats forged intimate ties with far-flung territories administered by U.S. troops and landowners. Combining social and environmental history with methods from Black studies, I map the transformation of Oakland’s fertile estuary into an infilled hub of postindustrial commerce, a vital node of military logistics, and a focal point for racialized labor migration. Simultaneously, this dissertation reveals how, over the long twentieth century, Black, Indigenous, Chinese, and other working-class Oaklanders found footholds on the harbor, often repurposing its imperial routes for dramatically different ends. Drawing on archives and oral histories in Cuba, Hawai‘i, and across the continental United States, I trace Oakland’s tradition of radical internationalism, most visible in the antiwar and Black Power movements of the sixties, to multi-generational struggles over the governance of coastal land. I argue that Oakland’s waterfront both bridged the continental and overseas expansion of an ascendant world power and came to serve as a proving ground for alternative forms of globalization. “The Water’s Edge” therefore offers a critical reappraisal of the generally place-bound history of North American urbanism and far-reaching lessons for building just cities in a present defined by global environmental crises.
Hometown Chinatown: A History of Oakland's Chinese Community, 1852-1995
Focusing on the local history of the Chinese in Oakland, California, this study examines common stereotypes in the early Chinese community and Chinatown organizations.
Why Robert Frank’s “The Americans” Matters Today
The photographer’s seminal monograph had a seismic impact on photography conventions and American culture.
Out of Oakland by Sean L Malloy | East Bay Booksellers
Out of Oakland offers a wonderful case study in the possibilities and limitations of transnational organizing. â? Diplomatic HistoryIn Out of Oakland, Sean L.
Oakland is a Vibe: Blackness, Cultural Framings and Emancipations of The Town
Author(s): Heitz, Kaily | Advisor(s): Scott Lewis, Jovan | Abstract: In this dissertation, I examine the ways that developers and Black community organizers in Oakland, California, utilize a situated concept of Black culture to produce value in the city. This value is constituted by a politics of Blackness rooted both in racial capitalism, shifting structures of community care, and their affective articulations. The affective qualities of Black Oakland – which includes a sense of relationality, creativity, and resistance – are understood colloquially as “vibe.” While representations of vibe are mobilized by both developers and community organizations to respectively advance and resist gentrification, I argue that the vibe of the city is constituted by a Black sense of place that cannot be reproduced through capitalist representations of cultural value alone. This study of vibe presents an opportunity to take seriously the invitation of Black geographic scholarship to work at the intersection of poetics and historical materialism by exploring relationality as a site that coproduces racialized space and experience. Where developers leverage notions of vibe to generate value through private investment, Black organizers utilize such representations in order to reclaim the physical space necessary to the very production of vibe. The latter strategy is, I suggest, an enactment of what I call “emancipatory framing,” in which hegemonic framing is mobilized in order to create alternative spaces for liberatory praxes. This dissertation explores vibe and emancipatory framing at three different scales: the Black body, the independent business, and the grassroots collective. I conclude that vibe as a material and metaphorical asset of Blackness, is at the root of contestations over place, and sometimes contradictory imaginaries of freedom.
Bret Victor - Stop Drawing Dead Fish
Robert Frank at 90: the photographer who revealed America won't look back
Filled with images of loneliness and shadow, Frank’s The Americans stands as one of photography’s greatest works
The First Map of Oakland, California: An Historical Speculation as Solution to an Enigma on JSTOR
Jack J. Studer, The First Map of Oakland, California: An Historical Speculation as Solution to an Enigma, California Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Mar., 1969), pp. 59-71
American Babylon
A gripping portrait of black power politics and the struggle for civil rights in postwar Oakland
In the Country of My Dreams-- — Oakland Public Library
In the Country of My Dreams-- — Abinader, Elmaz
Deep Oakland: How Geology Shaped a City [Hardcover] by Andrew Alden
A San Francisco Chronicle bestseller! Beneath Oakland’s streets and underfoot of every scurrying creature atop them, rocks roil, shift, crash, and collide Read the rocks as only a geologist can, with this deep drill-down into Oakland’s geological history and its impacts on the city’s urban present.
Mirror's Edge: An oral history
17 years on from its release, DICE's first-person parkour thriller remains in a class of its own. We spoke to nine team members about how the game came to be.
