Young America

Young America
Author: Claire Perry
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780300106206

A delightful look at how nineteenth-century American artists portrayed children and childhood

A Literary History of the American West

A Literary History of the American West
Author: Western Literature Association (U.S.)
Publisher: TCU Press
Total Pages: 1408
Release: 1987
Genre: American literature
ISBN: 9780875650210

Literary histories, of course, do not have a reason for being unless there exists the literature itself. This volume, perhaps more than others of its kind, is an expression of appreciation for the talented and dedicated literary artists who ignored the odds, avoided temptations to write for popularity or prestige, and chose to write honestly about the American West, believing that experiences long knowns to be of historical importance are also experiences that need and deserve a literature of importance.

A History of California Literature

A History of California Literature
Author: Blake Allmendinger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2015-05-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107052092

This History explores the historical periods, literary genres, and cultural movements of California.

The World Rushed In

The World Rushed In
Author: J. S. Holliday
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 577
Release: 2015-03-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0806181214

When The World Rushed In was first published in 1981, the Washington Post predicted, “It seems unlikely that anyone will write a more comprehensive book about the Gold Rush.” Twenty years later, no one has emerged to contradict that judgment, and the book has gained recognition as a classic. As the San Francisco Examiner noted, “It is not often that a work of history can be said to supplant every book on the same subject that has gone before it.” Through the diary and letters of William Swain--augmented by interpolations from more than five hundred other gold seekers and by letters sent to Swain from his wife and brother back home--the complete cycle of the gold rush is recreated: the overland migration of over thirty thousand men, the struggle to “strike it rich” in the mining camps of the Sierra Nevadas, and the return home through the jungles of the Isthmus of Panama. In a new preface, the author reappraises our continuing fascination with the “gold rush experience” as a defining epoch in western--indeed, American--history.

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.