Becoming Hoodlums: Boy Gangs and Public Space in San Francisco, 1866-1875

William McGovern
History
UC San Diego

The grantee’s project, “Becoming Hoodlums: Boy Gangs and Public Space in San Francisco, 1866-1875”, investigated the the emergence of boy gangs and their claims on public space in San Francisco. The late-1860s saw the emergence of a new social class—the hoodlum—that was different than earlier criminal and vagrant youths. City police, judges, educators, officials, and newspaper editors regularly complained about groups of vagrant boys who committed crimes, swore, and were obnoxious to adults throughout the city. Observers knew them for their novel forms of association, sociability, style, and brazen “deviancy”. Although this historical recovery concerned the heart of this project, it also addressed ongoing historiographical debates regarding the place of children in public and children’s agency during the late nineteenth century.