Reviews
"Inside the airport, you can’t literally see the past. Still, you might be able to commune with it when you read Eric Porter’s new lively book."—San Francisco Examiner
"Starting his history with the indigenous peoples and concluding with the airport’s impact on the environment in the twenty-first century Bay Area, Porter offers a history of the San Francisco airport deeply rooted in place and the iterative history of the Bay Area and its largest air transportation facility."—Pacific Historical Review
"This innovative, engaging book illuminates the extent to which a major urban airport can inform a spectrum of topics, in this case business promotion, labor relations, race relations, and environmental challenges. . . . The text offers a wealth of material on how important a large airport can be beyond serving as just a transportation hub."—CHOICE
"
A People's History of SFO is a must-read for students and scholars of urban history—and for anyone who has ever trekked through an airport terminal. In tracing the development of San Francisco International Airport, Eric Porter strikes an ideal balance between a broad view of regional development and a finely detailed evaluation of how Black activists, suburban homeowners, local policy makers, and visual artists interpreted SFO as both a mirror that reflected the Bay Area and a hammer with which to shape their distinct urban visions. I know of no other book that explores as wide a range of subjects with as great an attention to detail."—Daniel Widener, Professor of History, University of California, San Diego
"With A People's History of SFO, Porter delivers a rich and dynamic history of the San Francisco Bay Area and an inclusive account of airports as agents of empire and modernity."—Eric Avila, author of The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City
"A People's History of SFO situates the airport in entangled ecologies of social justice, racial capital, and globalizing city and environmental processes. Newly engaging the airport as a vital site where struggles for justice play out in complex and contradictory ways, Porter indicates its importance for both deep histories and uncertain futures."—Marina Peterson, author of Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles
"An innovative, wide-ranging study of the San Francisco International Airport, A People's History of SFO illuminates not only the history of the Bay Area, but the complicated international flow of travel, migration, and imperial relationships that connect the region to a world far beyond its borders. Attuned to everything from how SFO transformed the salt marsh and tidelands on which it was built, to its history as a site of immigration, activism, labor struggles, government-funded infrastructure development, corporate air commerce, and public art, Porter's book suggests we cannot begin to fully understand the networked character of modern life without learning more about airports."—Mia Bay, author of Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance
"We tend to think of airports as spaces we pass through, culturally and geographically peripheral to the cities they serve. Porter shows us, however, that SFO is a place with a history, shaped by the same forces as the rest of the Bay Area and beyond. In this fascinating book, the airport is not the conduit—it's the destination."—Natalia Molina, author of A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community
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