Southern San Joaquin Valley Scenes

Southern San Joaquin Valley Scenes
Author: Chris Brewer
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 132
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780738502458
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Known as "the fruit basket of the world," the Southern San Joaquin Valley is a great expanse of land rich in both resources and heritage. From the early Franciscan Friars, fur trappers, and explorers to the late-twentieth-century technological revolution, the area is rich in California history. The Southern San Joaquin Valley encompasses three counties in south central California, stretching from the citrus and cotton fields of Tulare and Kings Counties to the oil-rich land of Bakersfield and Kern County. This book contains nearly two hundred images of people, places, and events in the valley, some taken by noted photographers such as Carleton Watkins and C.A. Nelson, and others captured by everyday folks as family mementos. Ranging from a simple streetscape of early Visalia to photographs of field workers in Kern County, they provide an interesting glimpse of the valley's past, as seen by historians and other recorders of historical events.

The King Of California

The King Of California
Author: Mark Arax
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 550
Release: 2005-02-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0786752793
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The fascinating story of a cotton magnate whose voracious appetite for land drove him to create the first big agricultural empire of the Central Valley of California, and shaped the landscape for decades to come. J.G. Boswell was the biggest farmer in America. He built a secret empire while thumbing his nose at nature, politicians, labor unions and every journalist who ever tried to lift the veil on the ultimate "factory in the fields." The King of California is the previously untold account of how a Georgia slave-owning family migrated to California in the early 1920s,drained one of America 's biggest lakes in an act of incredible hubris and carved out the richest cotton empire in the world. Indeed, the sophistication of Boswell 's agricultural operation -from lab to field to gin -- is unrivaled anywhere. Much more than a business story, this is a sweeping social history that details the saga of cotton growers who were chased from the South by the boll weevil and brought their black farmhands to California. It is a gripping read with cameos by a cast of famous characters, from Cecil B. DeMille to Cesar Chavez.

The Dreamt Land

The Dreamt Land
Author: Mark Arax
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 577
Release: 2019-05-21
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1101875216
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A vivid, searching journey into California's capture of water and soil—the epic story of a people's defiance of nature and the wonders, and ruin, it has wrought Mark Arax is from a family of Central Valley farmers, a writer with deep ties to the land who has watched the battles over water intensify even as California lurches from drought to flood and back again. In The Dreamt Land, he travels the state to explore the one-of-a-kind distribution system, built in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, that is straining to keep up with California's relentless growth. The Dreamt Land weaves reportage, history and memoir to confront the "Golden State" myth in riveting fashion. No other chronicler of the West has so deeply delved into the empires of agriculture that drink so much of the water. The nation's biggest farmers—the nut king, grape king and citrus queen—tell their story here for the first time. Arax, the native son, is persistent and tough as he treks from desert to delta, mountain to valley. What he finds is hard earned, awe-inspiring, tragic and revelatory. In the end, his compassion for the land becomes an elegy to the dream that created California and now threatens to undo it.