Chris Burford

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is an American private research university located in Stanford, California on an 8,180-acre campus near Palo Alto, California, United States. It is situated in the northwestern Silicon Valley,... approximately 20 miles northwest of San Jose and 37 miles southeast of San Francisco. Leland Stanford, a Californian railroad tycoon and politician, founded the university in 1891 in honor of his son, Leland Stanford, Jr., who died of typhoid two months before his 16th birthday. The university was established as a coeducational and nondenominational institution, but struggled financially after the senior Stanford's 1893 death and after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, Provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates' entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would become known as Silicon Valley.
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Oakland is a major West Coast port city on San Francisco Bay in the U.S. state of California. It is the eighth-largest city in the state with a 2010 population of 390,724. Incorporated in 1852, Oakland is the county seat of Alameda County and is a central hub city for a region of the San Francisco... Bay Area known as the East Bay. The city lies directly across the bay from San Francisco. Oakland's territory covers what was once a mosaic of coastal terrace prairie, oak woodland, and north coastal scrub. Oakland served as a rich resource when its hillside oak and redwood timber were logged to build San Francisco, and Oakland's fertile flatland soils helped it become a prolific agricultural region. During the California Gold Rush, Oakland became the main staging post for passengers and cargo journeying between the Bay Area and the Sierra foothills. In the late 1860s, Oakland was selected as the western terminal of the Transcontinental Railroad. It continued to grow into the 20th century with its busy port, shipyards, and a thriving automobile industry.
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