Guide to the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire Digital Collection

Guide to the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire Digital Collection-

Based on the materials that were in this collection of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, I was able to tell that the city was undergoing a lot of hurt and madness. The fires and earthquakes rang throughout the city and I viewed many devastating digitized photographs from that time that displays the devastation. I viewed one photograph of refugees camping in front of the “Ferry Building”. This shows the amount of people that were impacted. And in the photo you can also see the dark clouds of smoke looming over the city of San Francisco. The devastating photos continued with wrecked buildings and lines of people waiting for relief products and shelter. Not only did this city have to endure fires which intensely affected the air quality and burns hundreds of acers, the earthquakes destroyed homes and buildings, leaving San Francisco in shambles. Based on these pictures that I looked at, if I were to make a narrative off of these photos, I would still have questions about the statistics about how many people were harmed, between the fires, the air quality, and the earthquake. In my opinion I am assuming that the number is very high and devastating. I am also interested in what the process was of re building the city. From a lot of the pictures I saw, homes, roads, and buildings were destroyed and even though this occurred a long time ago, I am interested in seeing how they lifted this city back up. Looking at some of the devastating things that have happened recently in our world, the next big focus is trying to figure where we go from here. And this would be interesting to see how the city came together to recover from large fires and earthquakes. Some kinds of sources that I think would be helpful to fill these gaps could be more photographs with what happened post the fires and earthquakes. Because a lot of the focus is the city and what the aftermath was of the fires and earthquakes but if there were some more articles focused on what happened after that would be very interesting. Also, I know the accessibility of cameras back then were limited, but more recorded footage would be interesting to see to get a sense of the mood in San Francisco. I really enjoyed looking at these archives and hope to fill in these gaps of these questions.