This article details the history of the San Francisco 49ers American Football Club. The San Francisco 49ers were the first major league professional sports franchise to be based in San Francisco, and one of the first professional sports teams based on the West Coast of the United States.
The 49ers have won five NFL championships – all Super Bowls. They were the first team to win five Super Bowls (Super Bowls XVI, XIX, XXIII, XXIV, and XXIX) and are the only team to compete in more than one Super Bowl - and win every Super Bowl they've played in. They are considered "The Team of the Eighties", winning four Super Bowls in the decade. Prior to the 80s, the 49ers had never won an NFL championship (They did not even win a division title until 1970). During the 1980s, they failed to make the playoffs only twice — in 1980, and again in the strike-shortened 1982 season which saw them go 0-5 at home and 3-1 on the road — the only time in NFL history that a team went winless at home while winning more than half its away games in the same season.
- See also List of San Francisco 49ers seasons
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“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“... that there is no other way,
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—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Mr. Wiggam, I want you to change the policy of The Clarion. I want you to write a story I should have written myself long ago. I want you to tell the people of San Francisco that no city can exist without law and order. Write a story about that flag, write about what verifies and brings a promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There are some people in this town who don’t seem to know that. Let The Clarion tell them.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)