Author and historian Robert Cherny is the author of seven monographs, co-author of two monographs and of college-level textbooks in US history and California history, co-editor of two anthologies, and author of some forty articles in journals or anthologies. Nearly all of his published work deals in some way with the post-Civil War history of the western US, and much of it deals with San Francisco and California.
Cherny will discuss how his research agenda changed in the mid-1980s, when he began to focus on the 1930s in San Francisco. That change began when he agreed to write a biography of Harry Bridges, the often controversial leader of what is now the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, a union active in all the Pacific Coast states and British Columbia. He will talk about how this research, and some subsequent extensions, eventually led to several journal articles and four books Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art (2017), Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend (2023), San Francisco Reds: Communists in the Bay Area, 1919-1958 (2024), and The Coit Tower Murals: New Deal Art and Political Controversy in San Francisco (2024). His forthcoming book summarizes the history of San Francisco from the arrival of the first humans to the present.
Cherny will spend a good portion of his lecture on The Coit Tower Murals, beginning with the context, then the artists at work, the murals, and the subsequent controversies about those and other New Deal murals in the city.
A virtual presentation by Robert W. Cherny, author, scholar, professor emeritus of history at San Francisco State University