Barbary Coast, San Francisco
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The Barbary Coast was a red-light district during the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries in San Francisco that featured dance halls, concert saloons, bars, jazz clubs, variety shows, and
The shipping docks of Buena Vista Cove at the east end of Pacific Street during the 1860s (San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)
Portsmouth Square, looking north to Telegraph Hill, 1851
International Settlement, 1940s, Pacific Avenue from Montgomery Street towards Kearney Street (San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)
Jazz pianist, composer, and vocalist Oscar Peterson
Shanghaiing
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Shanghaiing or crimping is the practice of kidnapping people to serve as sailors by coercive techniques such as trickery, intimidation, or violence. Those engaged in this form of kidnapping were known
Barbary Coast, San Francisco
…and sometimes clubbed unconscious. Sailors, who were frequently the targets of the pretty waiter girls, had cause to dread the area because the art of shanghaiing was perfected here. Many a sailor woke up after a night's leave to find himself unexpectedly on another ship bound for some faraway port. The verb to…
The shipping articles, or contract between the crew and the ship, from a 1786 voyage to Boston.
Andrew Furuseth (left) and Senator La Follette (center) were the architects of the Seamen's Act of 1915, pictured with muckraker Lincoln Steffens, c. 1915.
March 2017 Coors Kidnapping Ransom Note
Slavery