We see the world as they did through the medium of the Berkeley Daily Gazzette and old photographs from the era. We feel what life was like for children, woman, emmigrants, bussinessmen, animals and the Bay itself. We witness what people did for leisure, medicine, food, government and the whole of small town life.
The format is so raw and unemcumbered that it sweeps us away. In thirty chapters Schwartz prepares the reader with a textual introduction and follows with newspaper articles (scanned exactly as they appeared 100 years ago in the Berkeley Daily Gazzette), interwoven with quotes from people of the town in 1906 (so the book is as much their own voices as possible) and 175 hundred year old photographs, often puntuating a specific article. There are a total of about 650 newspaper articles from 1900 and 1905.
Richard Schwartz has given birth to a concept, a way of looking back which has moved everyone who has taken its ride into our past.
"Mr. Schwartz has put together a must read book for everyone who loves Berkeley. As we move into the Millennium, it is funny, sobering, and just plain interesting to read about daily events of life in Berkeley in 1900. There are lessons to be learned here, and stories to be told and retold." --Mayor Shirley Dean of Berkeley
"Berkeley 1900 is the first book on Berkeley to approach a true history of day-to-day life in the neighborhoods at the turn of the century." --Stephanie Manning, Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association
"A vivid picture...a fascinating, bottom-up view of Berkeley during the most important decade of its history."
--Dr. Charles Wallenberg, Professor of History, Vista College, Berkeley, California
"By giving us the raw data with which the history of place is constructed, Richard Schwartz has revealed both a time and a town that some of us only thought we knew. Newspaper articles and advertisements, as well as vintage photographs, permit the reader to view Berkeley's past without the processing of an intermediary, and in doing so, the material reveals a country which is alternately more exotic and familiar than we could have imagined. Schwartz has aided the reader by organizing the material by subject and providing brief introductions, thus serving as a knowledgeable but unobtrusive guide through that landscape. This splendidly rich composition should serve as a model for other communities seeking to understand how they have developed and who they are."
--Dr. Gray Brechin, Historical Geographer, University of California, Berkeley
"It was a good day when Richard Schwartz walked into the Berkeley Historical Society on the day we pondered disposing of these newspaper articles, which we were not able to archive because of their condition. His extracts from that material bring an intriguing picture of how we did things in the past in Berkeley and may help us to do better in the years of the new century."
--Ken Cardwell, President Emeritus and Linda Rosen, President, Berkeley Historical Society
