Next Three Events:
Download the Spring 2025 calendar as a pdf here.
Saturday, May 10, 11-1 pm
What's That Smell? NE Mission Industrial History
A Walking Tour with the San Francisco International Arts Festival (tickets link below)
Chris Carlsson, long-time grassroots historian and guide to San Francisco's lost, forgotten and overlooked histories, takes participants on a walk around the old industrial sites of the North Mission. Pungent odors such as ammonia, baking bread, and roasting hops, once common, are now only memories. As part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival, this is a ticketed event. Tickets on sale here.
Wednesday, May 14, 7:30 pm
80 Years After HUAC:
McCarthyism Resurgent
In 1960 the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) held its last-ever public hearings in San Francisco City Hall. Police turned fire hoses on peaceful student protesters while fiery rebukes were issued to the reactionary congressmen by Communist Party “witnesses.” This was a crucial turning point between the bone-chilling McCarthyism of the 1950s and the soon-to-explode movements for social liberation of the 1960s. We welcome David Palumbo-Liu to discuss what we might we learn about today as we witness transphobia on the rise, efforts to stamp out all pro-Palestinian speech, and other attacks on resistance in a strange echo of the ghosts of Cold War hysteria eight decades ago.
Co-sponsored by Left in the Bay
We welcome donations. Donate now!
Thursday, May 22, 6 pm
S.F. Dept. of Memory Pub Crawl
Special Event with members of the Dept. of Memory and you!
Join the San Francisco Department of Memory, an at-large team of community & local historians that preserve city memory, on a drink-finding mission through Financial District and North Beach bars. In our effort to recreate, delve into, and understand San Francisco's deep past to the recent present, we invite you to consult the spirits with us. Numquam Obliviscar: we'll never forget!
RSVP to shaping@foundsf.org
We welcome donations. Donate now!
Explore Shaping San Francisco:
Ecology Emerges
Discussions and reflections on the history of Bay Area ecological activism, based on oral histories documenting the past 50 years.
Ecology Emerges is an oral history gathering project to explore the past 50 years of ecological activism in the Bay Area and the role that individual and institutional memories play in the development, policy proposals, and interrelationships that together make up the existing networks of ecological politics. We document the living ecological activist movement, in their own words, but also in a larger context of urban growth and globalization.
Oral Histories
Shaping San Francisco, as part of our ongoing work, sits down with people who have stories to tell and conducts oral history interviews.
Check them out here.
"Editor's Pick Tour" from FoundSF.org
Comprised of over 1,400 pages, and 2,500 historical photos, the wiki-based archive FoundSF.org is the product of hundreds of contributors, regular people who were compelled by the chance to investigate some piece of this City's past.
Shaping San Francisco is fiscally sponsored by Independent Arts & Media, a California non-profit corporation.