Probably relatively well-known in music circles in his day, Herman Wasserman seems to only pop up today in conversation associated with George Gershwin. It seems like he was also a teacher to Ferde Grofé, who orchestrated Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. If you search library catalogs, he turns up as having edited George Gershwin’s Song-Book as […]

Wikimedia Commons holds a few remarkable maps of San Francisco from the 1850s. These maps, done as part of the US Coast Survey (now the National Geodetic Survey) were made a half century before the 1906 earthquakes and show a San Francisco that was largely limited to the Northeast part of the current city. I […]