This course studies the cultural life of the city from its days as a Spanish settlement named Yurba Buena to the present. It treats the historical and cultural life of the city as coextensive with modernity (modern capitalist development, including "progress" and its ideologies, which we generally refer to today as globalization). Because the city of SF is bound-up with modernity, it is something that is still happening, something that we are all participating in and working through. This course thinks the city as a history of the present.