The California Gold Rush Diary of a German Sailor
Author : Adolphus Windeler
Publisher :
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 13,53 MB
Release : 1969
Category : California
ISBN :
Daily Life during the California Gold Rush
Author : Thomas Maxwell-Long
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 19,13 MB
Release : 2014-09-09
Category : History
ISBN :
Book Description
This comprehensive narrative history of the California Gold Rush describes daily life during this historic period, documenting its wide-reaching effects and examining the significant individuals and organizations of the time. It is easy to see the vestiges of the California Gold Rush in the state's modern culture. The San Francisco 49ers football team are named after the term given to those who flocked to California in 1849 in search of gold; California is nicknamed "The Golden State;" and the official state motto is "Eureka" meaning "I have found it" in Greek-a reference to mining success. But the Gold Rush was not only a pivotal event with lasting impact in California; it also greatly affected America as a whole and global society. This book examines the historical significances of the California Gold Rush, beginning with life in California prior to the Gold Rush and European colonization and concluding with information regarding contemporary California. Readers will gain historical insights from the highly detailed explorations of how life in California evolved and understand the enormous impact of an event over 160 years ago on present-day America.
We the Miners
Author : Andrea G. McDowell
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 14,88 MB
Release : 2022-06-28
Category : History
ISBN : 0674276140
Book Description
A Financial Times Best History Book of the Year A surprising account of frontier law that challenges the image of the Wild West. In the absence of state authority, Gold Rush miners crafted effective government by the people—but not for all the people. Gold Rush California was a frontier on steroids: 1,500 miles from the nearest state, it had a constantly fluctuating population and no formal government. A hundred thousand single men came to the new territory from every corner of the nation with the sole aim of striking it rich and then returning home. The circumstances were ripe for chaos, but as Andrea McDowell shows, this new frontier was not nearly as wild as one would presume. Miners turned out to be experts at self-government, bringing about a flowering of American-style democracy—with all its promises and deficiencies. The Americans in California organized and ran meetings with an efficiency and attention to detail that amazed foreign observers. Hundreds of strangers met to adopt mining codes, decide claim disputes, run large-scale mining projects, and resist the dominance of companies financed by outside capital. Most notably, they held criminal trials on their own authority. But, mirroring the societies back east from which they came, frontiersmen drew the boundaries of their legal regime in racial terms. The ruling majority expelled foreign miners from the diggings and allowed their countrymen to massacre the local Native Americans. And as the new state of California consolidated, miners refused to surrender their self-endowed authority to make rules and execute criminals, presaging the don’t-tread-on-me attitudes of much of the contemporary American west. In We the Miners, Gold Rush California offers a well-documented test case of democratic self-government, illustrating how frontiersmen used meetings and the rules of parliamentary procedure to take the place of the state.
The World Rushed In
Author : J. S. Holliday
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
Page : 577 pages
File Size : 30,44 MB
Release : 2015-03-16
Category : History
ISBN : 0806181214
Book Description
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.
A Golden State
Author : Marlene Smith-Baranzini
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 532 pages
File Size : 21,72 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780520217706
Book Description
A collection of essays on mining and economic development in California from the Gold Rush through the end of the 19th century. This is the second in a series of four volumes comemmorating the state's sesquicentennial.
California Gold Camps
Author : Erwin G. Gudde
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 479 pages
File Size : 28,55 MB
Release : 2009-04
Category : History
ISBN : 0520261445
Book Description
Many books have been written about the California Gold Rush, but a geographical-historical dictionary has long been lacking. With the publication of California Gold Camps, a monumental project has been completed. California Gold Camps is a basic reference that will be indispensable to the historian, the geographer, and to the general reader interested in California's colorful past.
Federal Justice in California
Author : Christian G. Fritz
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 20,79 MB
Release : 1991-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780803219793
Book Description
For forty years Ogden Hoffman presided over the federal district court for the Northern District of California, disposing of more than nineteen thousand cases brought before him. Federal Justice in California: The Court of Ogden Hoffman, 1851-1891 considers a career remarkable for longevity and productivity and at the same time examines the operation of a federal trial court in nineteenth-century America - the cases adjudicated, their significance, and the court's impact upon the community. Solidly researched, Christian G. Fritz's book is unique in attending to the law on the level at which it was most often encountered by participants in legal actions. During his four decades on the bench, from the time of the California gold rush to the anti-Chinese movement of the 1880s, Hoffman dealt one-on-one with a cross-section of humanity: through his court came sea captains, seamen seeking their wages, wealthy steamship owners and distraught and injured passengers, and Chinese immigrants. Fritz shows him adjudicating land grant conflicts and bankruptcy cases and presiding over the admiralty, criminal, and common law and equity dockets. The author has examined thousands of Hoffman's cases to gain insight into how nineteenth-century federal trial courts were used, by whom, and with what effect. The successful use that a broad range of plaintiffs made of Hoffman's court requires a re-examination of theories suggesting that law of the period primarily developed and courts largely operated in ways that promoted commercial and entrepreneurial interest. Just as important, Fritz's sensitive analysis of an institution never loses sight of the proud life-long bachelor, native New Yorker, and scion of adistinguished family who always identified himself with his court. Christian G. Fritz is a professor of law at the University of New Mexico.
Gold Rush Port
Author : James P. Delgado
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 253 pages
File Size : 33,55 MB
Release : 2009-03-04
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0520255801
Book Description
Described as a "forest of masts," San Francisco's Gold Rush waterfront was a floating economy of ships and wharves, where a dazzling array of global goods was traded and transported. Drawing on excavations in buried ships and collapsed buildings from this period, James P. Delgado re-creates San Francisco's unique maritime landscape, shedding new light on the city's remarkable rise from a small village to a boomtown of thousands in the three short years from 1848 to 1851. Gleaning history from artifacts—preserves and liquors in bottles, leather boots and jackets, hulls of ships, even crocks of butter lying alongside discarded guns—Gold Rush Port paints a fascinating picture of how ships and global connections created the port and the city of San Francisco. Setting the city's history into the wider web of international relationships, Delgado reshapes our understanding of developments in the Pacific that led to a world system of trading.
Lynching in the West, 1850-1935
Author : Ken Gonzales-Day
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 330 pages
File Size : 30,25 MB
Release : 2006
Category : History
ISBN : 9780822337942
Book Description
This visual and textual study of lynchings that took place in California between 1850 and 1935 shows that race-based lynching in the United States reached far beyond the South.
Crow's Range
Author : David Beesley
Publisher : University of Nevada Press
Page : 409 pages
File Size : 13,33 MB
Release : 2017-04-04
Category : History
ISBN : 0874176344
Book Description
John Muir called it the "Range of Light, the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain chains I’ve ever seen." The Sierra Nevada—a single unbroken mountain range stretching north to south over four hundred miles, best understood as a single ecosystem but embracing a number of environmental communities—has been the site of human activity for millennia. From the efforts of ancient Native Americans to encourage game animals by burning brush to create meadows to the burgeoning resort and residential development of the present, the Sierra has endured, and often suffered from, the efforts of humans to exploit its bountiful resources for their own benefit. Historian David Beesley examines the history of the Sierra Nevada from earliest times, beginning with a comprehensive discussion of the geologic development of the range and its various ecological communities. Using a wide range of sources, including the records of explorers and early settlers, scientific and government documents, and newspaper reports, Beesley offers a lively and informed account of the history, environmental challenges, and political controversies that lie behind the breathtaking scenery of the Sierra. Among the highlights are discussions of the impact of the Gold Rush and later mining efforts, as well as the supporting industries that mining spawned, including logging, grazing, water-resource development, market hunting, urbanization, and transportation; the politics and emotions surrounding the establishment of Yosemite and other state and national parks; the transformation of the Hetch Hetchy into a reservoir and the desertification of the once-lush Owens Valley; the roles of the Forest Service, Park Service, and other regulatory agencies; the consequences of the fateful commitment to wildfire suppression in Sierran forests; and the ever-growing impact of tourism and recreational use. Through Beesley’s wide-ranging discussion, John Muir’s "divinely beautiful" range is revealed in all its natural and economic complexity, a place that at the beginning of the twenty-first century is in grave danger of being loved to death. Available in hardcover and paperback.
