Monika Trobits

Monika Trobits is the author of Bay Area Coffee: A Stimulating History (Arcadia Publishing, 2019) and Antebellum and Civil War San Francisco: A Western Theatre for Northern & Southern Politics (Arcadia Publishing, 2014) .

Coffee hopscotched across four continents and cruised two oceans before landing on the Pacific coast of North America. San Francisco was destined to become the third largest coffee port in the United States. From the 19th century to the 21st, the San Francisco Bay Area has attracted waves of coffee entrepreneurs, innovators and connoisseurs. Told against the backdrop of local history, Bay Area Coffee tells their story.

San Francisco in the mid-19th century, an instant city, geographically isolated in the West, yet fated to be the gateway for a worldwide migration in search of golden dreams. Argonauts rushed west from the Northern and Southern states, seemingly leaving behind the political and economic slavery-related tensions of the era only to find that it had all traveled west with them. Thousands made the arduous journey to San Francisco, a boomtown, fraught with daily dramas, political rivalries and heated battles over pending statehood.

Monika Trobits has lived in San Francisco for more than 36 years and is a native of New York City. She’s a long-time independent San Francisco walking tour docent/guide and has taught walking history courses for the OLLI program based at SFSU since 2016. In 2010, Monika began writing non-fiction works about the city. Her article “Dashiell Hammett’s San Francisco in the 1920s” was published in the winter 2011 edition of the Argonaut, a local historic journal.