Gold

Gold
Author: John Richard Stephens
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2014-06-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1493010956

The Gold Rush era was an amazing time in our country’s history. California had just been occupied during the Mexican-American War and wasn’t officially a U.S. territory yet when gold was discovered in 1848. Suddenly the whole world was electrified by the news and tales of men digging vast amounts of wealth out of the ground, even finding gold nuggets just lying around. Within five years, 250,000 miners dug up more than $200 million in gold—about $600 billion in today’s dollars. Gold offers a feel for what it was like to live through the heady days of the discovery and exploitation of gold in California in the mid-1800s through firsthand accounts, short stories, and tall tales written by the people who were there. These eyewitness accounts offer an immediacy that brings the events to life.

The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War

The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War
Author: Leonard L. Richards
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2008-02-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307277577

Award-winning historian Leonard L. Richards gives us an authoritative and revealing portrait of an overlooked harbinger of the terrible battle that was to come. When gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in 1848, Americans of all stripes saw the potential for both wealth and power. Among the more calculating were Southern slave owners. By making California a slave state, they could increase the value of their slaves—by 50 percent at least, and maybe much more. They could also gain additional influence in Congress and expand Southern economic clout, abetted by a new transcontinental railroad that would run through the South. Yet, despite their machinations, California entered the union as a free state. Disillusioned Southerners would agitate for even more slave territory, leading to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and, ultimately, to the Civil War itself.

Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California

Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California
Author: John Ott
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351559303

Through the example of Central Pacific Railroad executives, Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California redirects attention from the usual art historical protagonists - artistic producers - and rewrites narratives of American art from the unfamiliar vantage of patrons and collectors. Neither denouncing, nor lionizing, nor dismissing its subjects, it demonstrates the benefits of taking art consumers seriously as active contributors to the cultural meanings of artwork. It explores the critical role of art patronage in the articulation of a new and distinctly modern elite class identity for newly ascendant corporate executives and financiers. These economic elites also sought to legitimate trends in industrial capitalism, such as mechanization, incorporation, and proletarianization, through their consumption of a diverse array of elite culture, including regional landscapes, panoramic and stop-motion photography, history paintings of the California Gold Rush, the architecture of Stanford University, and the design of domestic galleries. This book addresses not only readers in the art history and visual and material cultures of the United States, but also scholars of patronage studies, American Studies, and the sociology of culture. It tells a story still relevant to this new Gilded Age of the early 21st century, in which wealthy collectors dramatically shape contemporary art markets and institutions.

Gold Rush Manliness

Gold Rush Manliness
Author: Christopher Herbert
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2018-11-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0295744146

The mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes bring to mind raucous mining camps and slapped-together cities populated by carousing miners, gamblers, and prostitutes. Yet many of the white men who went to the gold fields were products of the Victorian era: educated men who valued morality and order. Examining the closely linked gold rushes in California and British Columbia, historian Christopher Herbert shows that these men worried about the meaning of their manhood in the near-anarchic, ethnically mixed societies that grew up around the mines. As white gold rushers emigrated west, they encountered a wide range of people they considered inferior and potentially dangerous to white dominance, including Latin American, Chinese, and Indigenous peoples. The way that white miners interacted with these groups reflected their conceptions of race and morality, as well as the distinct political principles and strategies of the US and British colonial governments. The white miners were accustomed to white male domination, and their anxiety to continue it played a central role in the construction of colonial regimes. In addition to renovating traditional understandings of the Pacific Slope gold rushes, Herbert argues that historians’ understanding of white manliness has been too fixated on the eastern United States and Britain. In the nineteenth century, popular attention largely focused on the West. It was in the gold fields and the cities they spawned that new ideas of white manliness emerged, prefiguring transformations elsewhere.

Gunsmoke and Saddle Leather

Gunsmoke and Saddle Leather
Author: Charles G. Worman
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 544
Release: 2005
Genre: Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN: 9780826335937

The many roles played by guns in the old West with personal accounts by many early settlers and hundreds of photos.

When Law Was in the Holster

When Law Was in the Holster
Author: John Boessenecker
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 504
Release: 2012-09-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0806187727

One of the great lawmen of the Old West, Bob Paul (1830–1901) cast a giant shadow across the frontiers of California and Arizona Territory for nearly fifty years. Today he is remembered mainly for his friendship with Wyatt Earp and his involvement in the stirring events surrounding the famous 1881 gunfight near the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. This long-overdue biography fills crucial gaps in Paul’s story and recounts a life of almost constant adventure. As told by veteran western historian John Boessenecker, this story is more than just a western shoot-’em-up, and it reveals Paul to be far more than a blood-and-thunder gunfighter. Beginning with Paul’s boyhood adventures as a whaler in the South Pacific, the author traces his journey to Gold Rush California, where he served respectively as constable, deputy sheriff, and sheriff in Calaveras County, and as Wells Fargo shotgun messenger and detective. Then, in the turbulent 1880s, Paul became sheriff of Pima County, Arizona, and a railroad detective for the Southern Pacific. In 1890 President Benjamin Harrison appointed him U.S. marshal of Arizona Territory. Transcending local history, Paul’s story provides an inside look into the rough-and-tumble world of frontier politics, electoral corruption, Mexican-U.S. relations, border security, vigilantism, and western justice. Moreover, issues that were important in Paul’s career—illegal immigration, smuggling on the Mexican border, youth gangs, racial discrimination, ethnic violence, and police-minority relations—are as relevant today as they were during his lifetime.

Palo Alto

Palo Alto
Author: Malcolm Harris
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 761
Release: 2023-02-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0316592021

Named One of the Year's Best Books by VULTURE • THE NEW REPUBLIC • DAZED • WIRED • BLOOMBERG • ESQUIRE • SALON • THE NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB The history of Silicon Valley, from railroads to microchips, is an “extraordinary” story of disruption and destruction, told for the first time in this comprehensive, jaw-dropping narrative (Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of the Myth). Palo Alto’s weather is temperate, its people are educated and enterprising, its corporations are spiritually and materially ambitious and demonstrably world-changing. Palo Alto is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system. In PALO ALTO, the first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris examines how and why Northern California evolved in the particular, consequential way it did, tracing the ideologies, technologies, and policies that have been engineered there over the course of 150 years of Anglo settler colonialism, from IQ tests to the "tragedy of the commons," racial genetics, and "broken windows" theory. The Internet and computers, too. It's a story about how a small American suburb became a powerful engine for economic growth and war, and how it came to lead the world into a surprisingly disastrous 21st century. PALO ALTO is an urgent and visionary history of the way we live now, one that ends with a clear-eyed, radical proposition for how we might begin to change course.

The Decline of the Californios

The Decline of the Californios
Author: Leonard Pitt
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 1966
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520016378

""Decline of the Californios" is one of those rare works that first gained fame for its pathbreaking and original nature, but which now maintains its status as a classic of California and ethnic history."--Douglas Monroy, author of "Thrown among Strangers"

Decline of the Californios

Decline of the Californios
Author: Leonard Pitt
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520219588

Charts the social and ethnic history of Spanish-speaking California and the displacement of California's Mexican ranching elite following the Mexican War and the gold rush of 1849.

Riches for All

Riches for All
Author: Kenneth N. Owens
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2002-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780803286177

An event of international significance, the California gold rush created a more diverse, metropolitan society than the world had ever known. In Riches for All, leading scholars reexamine the gold rush, evaluating its trajectory and legacy within a global context of religion and race, economics, technology, law, and culture. The opportunity for instant wealth directly influenced a dynamic range of peoples, including Mormon military veterans, California Indian workers, both slave and free African Americans, Chinese village farmers, skilled Mexican miners, and Chilean merchants. Riches for All gives attention to the varying motivations and experiences of these groups and to their struggles with both racial and religious bigotry. Emphasizing gold rush social history, some contributors examine the roles and influence of women, workers, law-breakers, and law-enforcers. Others consider the long-term impact of this episode on California and the American West and on subsequent gold rushes in Pacific Rim countries and the Klondike. With lively and incisive strokes, these historians sketch the most broadly contextualized and nuanced portrait of the California gold rush to date.