Berkeley 1900: Daily Life at the Turn of the Century

Berkeley 1900 is a book that really tells of the everyday lives of everyday people in Berkeley, California 100 years ago.

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

Richard Schwartz grew up in Philadelphia, PA. While in college, he worked on a Pennsylvania Dutch farm. He came to Berkeley in 1973 after graduating with a degree in English literature from Temple University. In 1976, after spending a number of years teaching and playing jazz drums, Schwartz joined the U.S. Forest Service to fight forest fires. His curiosity and love of the mountains and the outdoors led him to his first book, The Circle of Stones. This book is a nonfiction archeological mystery about who built a sixty-five foot in diameter stone circle in a Sierran valley near Truckee, California and why.

Schwartz has been involved in the construction trade since 1968 and has been a Berkeley building contractor since 1982 and through the present. His drum playing led him to Brazil to study and he returned to be the musical director for the drum and dance troupe Orixa Baba in 1992.

Richard has written history articles for the Alameda County Historical Society, the Berkeley Historical Society, the Truckee Historical Society and the Bay Area Rock Art Research Association (a petroglyph research association). He has given book readings for The Circle of Stones twice at the Berkeley Barnes and Noble, the Jack London Square Oakland Barnes and Noble and twice for the Truckee Historical Society. His work is also shown at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com on the internet. He has been a bay area resident beginning in 1973.

In 1996, he was at the Berkeley Historical Society as they were about to throw away a stack of Berkeley newspapers circa 1900 due to possible mold in the editions. He couldn't imagine them getting thrown away, so he took them home. He didn't know it at the time, but that was the beginning of his next odyssey and book, Berkeley 1900, due to be released in late April, 2000.