While the city of Berkeley, California, is widely known as the home of remarkable individuals - from cutting-edge entrepreneurs and Nobel Prize winners to visionary social critics and hippie clowns - the story of its iconoclastic culture begins for many with the historic social movements of the 1960s. In Eccentrics, Heroes, and Cutthroats of Old Berkeley, author Richard Schwartz reveals that legendary personalities have been at the center of Berkeley life since its founding. Focusing on the period from 1850 to 1925, Schwartz brings to life Berkeley's defining men and women - squatters and speculators; missionaries and mystics; vendors, inventors, and industrialists. The result is not only an authoritative history that gives meaning to the streets of Berkeley we walk today, but also a delightful storyteller's anthology, full of humor, drama, sadness, and hard-earned wisdom.

Richard Schwartz is a California historian and author of Earthquake Exodus, 1906: Berkeley Responds to the San Francisco Refugees; Berkeley 1900: Daily Life at the Turn of the Century; and The Circle of Stones: An Investigation of the Circle of Stones in Stampede Valley, Sierra County, California. He lives in Berkeley, California, where he also works as a building contractor.

This is a first edition, first printing, new trade paperback book published 2007 by RSB Books in Berkeley, CA. It contains 244 pages and is well illustrated with B&W historical photos. It measures 9.75" x 10".