Ordering the disorderly city: Power, culture, and nation -making in San Francisco, 1846--1906

This dissertation seeks to answer vexing questions about the interplay of culture and nation-making in boom-town San Francisco---a place in formation inhabited by a people in formation. It presents a reconceptualization of San Francisco's nineteenth-century history that highlights the importance of imperial, nation-making processes to struggles over order and power in a newly acquired, rapidly urbanizing, heavily immigrant society. By focusing on the intersection of nation-making and the city's cultural spaces, this dissertation draws attention to the significance of cultural ordering---the process of forging social relationships in and through the city's cultural spaces---which was integral to the consolidation of a distinctly American social order built on hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Snapshots of the micro-workings of power in five key cultural spaces form the basis of this analysis: restaurants, hotels, and boardinghouses; places of amusement; Chinatown; the Mechanics' Institute's annual fairs; and the 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition. Each is placed in the context of the macro processes of urbanization, capitalist development, and immigration that transformed the city from pueblo to metropolis during this period.;By analyzing the discourses, practices, and places these sites generated, this dissertation shows how attempts to organize this urban contact zone through processes of cultural ordering were asserted by the city's burgeoning elites and contested by the racially and ethnically diverse, economically fluid, and preponderantly male population of post-Gold Rush San Francisco. At one level, this study shows how race, class, and gender based hierarchies deployed in ordering the city were adaptations---tempered by local conditions---of the terms that structured nation-making and the body politic across the country. At another level, this work demonstrates the incomplete nature of attempts to order the disorderly city on the complex terrain of the cultural politics of everyday life. As the century progressed, social fluidity declined and a social order more in step with nationally dominant hierarchies became increasingly prevalent. Yet because cultural ordering was inherently unstable, conflict and disorder rooted in the social organization of race, class, and gender remained pivotal and ongoing throughout.