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Occupational And Geographic Mobility In San Francisco, 1870-1890, Jill Siegel Dodd

Honors Papers

This study will focus on social mobility in San Francisco in the late nineteenth century. The question I want to answer is, does the quantitative evidence available support the contention that nineteenth century America was a land in which a man was free to rise as far as his talents could carry him? More specifically, I will closely examine a representative sample of 1009 San Francisco, residents. I gathered this sample from the Federal manuscript census of 1870, and then traced its members through San Francisco's city directories through 1890. In this way, I have sought to uncover meaningful patterns …