Selections From The Oakland Tribune Archives

The landmark Oakland Tribune clock tower has been telling the time in neon in downtown Oakland since it was built in 1923, but the paper itself first appeared on city streets as early as 1874. For over a half century, the paper was owned and published by the influential and civic-minded Knowland family, who spearheaded efforts to modernize the Port of Oakland, construct the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge, and establish a regional park system for Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. Following the Loma Prieta earthquake, the damaged clock tower on Thirteenth Streetwhere Harry Houdini once hung by his heels above gawking crowds on Broadwaywas sadly vacant, but today it is once again busy with the buzz and bustle of the newsroom.

Oakland has been shaped by the transcontinental railroad, freeways, earthquakes, and its location on the shores of San Francisco Bay. But what makes Oakland such an amazing city are the people who have called Oakland home over the years, like Mayor Samuel Merritt, who helped make Oakland the terminus of the transcontinental railroad; Elizabeth Flood, who worked to desegregate Oakland schools in the 1870s; and F.M. “Borax” Smith, who created the Key System. Oakland has been home to game-changing athletes like “father of modern tennis” Don Budge and Curt Flood, who helped bring free agency to sports; artists like writer Jack London, dancer Isadora Duncan, poet Joaquin Miller, and cartoonist Morrie Turner; and culture-shaping movements like the Black Panther Party. However, the impact of Oaklanders is not just historical. From Oscar Grant to Favianna Rodriguez to Marshawn Lynch to Jerry Brown, people in Oakland continue to shape not just “the Town,” but the entire country.

Now in its second edition, this comprehensive study of the Vietnam War sheds more light on the longest and one of the most controversial conflicts in U.S. history. The Vietnam War lasted more than a decade, was the longest war in U.S. history, and cost the lives of nearly 60,000 American soldiers, as well as millions of Vietnamese—many of whom were uninvolved civilians. The lessons learned from this tragic conflict continue to have great relevance in today's world. Now in its second edition, The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History adds an entire additional volume of entries to the already exhaustive first edition, making it the most comprehensive reference available about one of the most controversial events in U.S. history. Written to provide multidimensional perspectives into the conflict, it covers not only the American experience in Vietnam, but also the entire scope of Vietnamese history, including the French experience and the Indochina War, as well as the origins of the conflict, how the United States became involved, and the extensive aftermath of this prolonged war. It also provides the most complete and accurate order of battle ever published, based upon data compiled from Vietnamese sources. This latest release delivers even more of what readers have come to expect from the editorship of Spencer C. Tucker and the military history experts at ABC-CLIO.

In 1938, Hazel Frome, the wife of a powerful executive at Atlas Powder Company, a San Francisco explosives manufacturer, set out on a cross-country motor trip with her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Nancy. When their car broke down in El Paso, Texas, they made the most of being stranded by staying at a posh hotel and crossing the border to Juarez for shopping, dining, and drinking. A week later, their near-nude bodies were found in the Chihuahuan Desert. Though they had been seen on occasion with two mystery men, there were no clues as to why they had apparently been abducted, tortured for days, and shot execution style. El Paso sheriff Chris Fox, a lawman right out of central casting, engaged in a turf war with the Texas Rangers and local officials that hampered the investigation. But the victims' detours had placed them in the path of a Nazi spy ring operating from the West Coast to Latin America through a deep-cover portal at El Paso. The sleeper cell was run by spymasters at the German consulate in San Francisco. In 1938, only the inner circle of the Roosevelt White House and a few FBI agents were aware of the extent to which German agents had infiltrated American industry. Fetch the Devil is the first narrative account of this still officially unsolved case. Based on long forgotten archives and recently declassified FBI files, Richmond paints a convincing portrait of a sheriff's dogged investigation into a baffling murder, the international spy ring that orchestrated it, and America on the brink of another world war.

Six plein-air painters in Oakland, California, joined together in 1917 to form an association that lasted nearly fifteen years. The Society of Six—Selden Connor Gile, Maurice Logan, William H. Clapp, August F. Gay, Bernard von Eichman, and Louis Siegriest—created a color-centered modernist idiom that shocked establishment tastes but remains the most advanced painting of its era in Northern California. Nancy Boas's well-informed and sumptuously illustrated chronicle recognizes the importance of these six painters in the history of American Post-Impressionism. The Six found themselves in the position of an avant garde not because they set out to reject conventionality, but because they aspired to create their own indigenous modernism. While the artists were considered outsiders in their time, their work is now recognized as part of the vital and enduring lineage of American art. Depression hardship ended the Six's ascendancy, but their painterliness, use of color, and deep alliance with the land and the light became a beacon for postwar Northern California modern painters such as Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud. Combining biography and critical analysis, Nancy Boas offers a fitting tribute to the lives and exhilarating painting of the Society of Six.

Pentecostalism was born at the turn of the twentieth century in a "tumble-down shack" in a rundown semi-industrial area of Los Angeles composed of a tombstone shop, saloons, livery stables and railroad freight yards. One hundred years later Pentecostalism has not only proven to be the most dynamic representative of Christian faith in the past century, but a transnational religious phenomenon as well. In a global context Pentecostalism has attained a membership of 500 million growing at the rate of 20 million new members a year. Aimee Semple McPherson, born on a Canadian farm, was Pentecostalism's first celebrity, its "female Billy Sunday". Arriving in Southern California with her mother, two children and $100.00 in 1920, "Sister Aimee", as she was fondly known, quickly achieved the height of her fame. In 1926, by age 35, "Sister Aimee" would pastor "America's largest 'class A' church", perhaps becoming the country's first mega church pastor. In Los Angeles she quickly became a folk hero and civic institution. Hollywood discovered her when she brilliantly united the sacred with the profane. Anthony Quinn would play in the Temple band and Aimee would baptize Marilyn Monroe, council Jean Harlow and become friends with Charlie Chaplain, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Based on the biographer's first time access to internal church documents and cooperation of Aimee's family and friends, this major biography offers a sympathetic appraisal of her rise to fame, revivals in major cities and influence on American religion and culture in the Jazz Age. The biographer takes the reader behind the scenes of Aimee's fame to the early days of her harsh apprenticeship in revival tents, failed marriages and poverty. Barfoot recreates the career of this "called" and driven woman through oral history, church documents and by a creative use of new source material. Written with warmth and often as dramatic as Aimee, herself, the author successfully captures not only what made Aimee famous but also what transformed Pentecostalism from its meager Azusa Street mission beginnings into a transnational, global religion.

A potent symbol of black power and radical inspiration, the Black Panthers still evoke strong emotions. This edition of Jane Rhodes's acclaimed study examines the extraordinary staying power of the Black Panthers in the American imagination. Probing the group's longtime relationship to the media, Rhodes traces how the Panthers articulated their message through symbols and tactics the mass media could not resist. By exploiting press coverage through everything from posters to public appearances to photo ops, the Panthers created a linguistic and symbolic universe as salient today as during the group's heyday. They also pioneered a sophisticated version of mass media activism that powers contemporary African American protest. Featuring a timely new preface by the author, Framing the Black Panthers is a breakthrough reconsideration of a fascinating phenomenon.