World War II brought huge changes to the San Francisco Bay Area. While Japanese American were expelled and thousands of young men were sent overseas, the newly opened shipyards, military bases, and wartime factories offered unheard of opportunities-especially for women, minorities, and those displaced during the Dust Bowl years. Hundred of thousands of people swarmed into the area, creating an era that historian Marilynn Johnson has characterized as the "Second God Rush."
Stationing herself in front of stores and markets, on street corners and at the entranceway to the shipyards, Dorothea Lange photographed these chaotic and eventful times. At the height of her creative powers, she produced a body of work that documents not merely the changing of an old world, but the birth of a new world-one that we recognize as our own.
Photographing the Second Gold Rush offers sixty photographs, most of them never before published, plus an introduction by noted historian Charles Wollenberg on Dorothea Lange and the Bay Area during these formative years.