Days of Gold

Days of Gold PDF Author: Malcolm J. Rohrbough
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520216598
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
When gold was discovered in California in 1848, the news caused the greatest mass migration in the history of the Republic. This comprehensive history demonstrates how the Gold Rush touched the lives of families & communities everywhere in the U.S.

Days of Gold

Days of Gold PDF Author: Malcolm J. Rohrbough
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520216598
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
When gold was discovered in California in 1848, the news caused the greatest mass migration in the history of the Republic. This comprehensive history demonstrates how the Gold Rush touched the lives of families & communities everywhere in the U.S.

Gold!

Gold! PDF Author: Fred Rosen
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504024486
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
A riveting true account of gold rush fever in mid-nineteenth-century America, rich with the thrilling exploits of daring fortune seekers and dangerous outlaws America was never the same after January 24, 1848. It was on that day that a carpenter named James Marshall discovered a tiny nugget of gold while building a sawmill at Sutter’s Fort, just east of Sacramento, California. Marshall’s find ignited a fever the nation had never known before, drawing people from all over the country to the West Coast with high hopes of getting rich quick. Over the next six years, three hundred thousand prospectors raced to the California gold fields to make their fortunes, leaving their lands and families behind in order to chase a dream of easy wealth, but all too often encountering a reality of lawlessness, disease, cruelty, and death. A former columnist for the New York Times, author Fred Rosen takes readers back to the seminal moment when the American dream exploded. Chock full of fascinating details, unforgettable characters, and shocking real-life events, the captivating true story of the California gold rush brings an era of unparalleled change to breathtaking life. Rosen’s enthralling history of the gold rush of 1848 demonstrates how this golden ideal was supplanted by a culture of selfishness and greed that endures in America to this very day.

From California's Gold Fields to the Mendocino Coast

From California's Gold Fields to the Mendocino Coast PDF Author: Samuel M. Otterstrom
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
ISBN: 0874174694
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
California’s history is rich and diverse, with numerous fascinating stories hidden in its past. Before the discovery of gold in the Sierras, San Francisco (Yerba Buena) and its surroundings comprised a sparsely populated frontier on the edge of the old Spanish realm. After 1848, the area rapidly transformed into a settled urban system as a tremendous influx of prospectors and settlers came to seek their fortune in California. A wave of gold miners, merchants, farmers, politicians, carpenters, and many others from various backgrounds and corners of the world migrated to the area at that time. Interrelated social, geographic, and economic processes led to a very quick metamorphosis from frontier settlement to a firmly established system with ingrained economic patterns. The development of San Francisco’s outlying region from a wilderness into a prosperous village and farming mecca shows how quickly in-migration coupled with economic diversification can establish a stable settlement structure upon the landscape. Otterstrom describes an intricately woven tapestry of interrelated people who were contributing creators of a wide variety of prosperous northern California environs. He uncovers the processes that converted this sleepy post-Mexican outpost into a focal point of nearly hyperactive youthful growth. The narrative follows this crucial story of settlement development until the dawn of the twentieth century, through the interconnected framework of individual and family ingenuity, migration trajectories, and diverse geographical scales. Multiplying individualistic experiences from across far-flung appendages of the Northern California system into larger and larger scales, Otterstrom has achieved a matchless historical and sociological study that will form the basis for any future studies of the area.

The World Rushed In

The World Rushed In PDF Author: J. S. Holliday
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806181214
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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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.

Hard Road West

Hard Road West PDF Author: Keith Heyer Meldahl
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226923290
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
The dramatic journeys of the 19th century Gold Rush come to life in this geologist’s tour of the American West and the events that shaped the land. In 1848, news of the discovery of gold in California triggered an enormous wave of emigration toward the Pacific. The dramatic terrain these settlers crossed is so familiar to us now that it is hard to imagine how frightening—even godforsaken—its sheer rock faces and barren deserts once seemed to them. Hard Road West brings their perspective vividly to life, weaving together the epic overland journey of the covered wagon trains and the compelling story of the landscape they encountered. Taking readers along the 2,000-mile California Trail, Keith Meldahl uses settler’s diaries and letters—as well as his own experiences on the trail—to reveal how the geology and geography of the West shaped our nation’s westward expansion. He guides us through a landscape of sawtooth mountains, following the meager streams that served as lifelines through an arid land, all the way to California itself, where colliding tectonic plates created breathtaking scenery and planted the gold that lured travelers west in the first place. “Alternates seamlessly between vivid accounts of the 19th-century journey and lucid explanations of the geological events that shaped the landscape traveled.”—Library Journal

Path of Empire

Path of Empire PDF Author: Aims McGuinness III
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501707337
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Most people in the United States have forgotten that tens of thousands of U.S. citizens migrated westward to California by way of Panama during the California Gold Rush. Decades before the completion of the Panama Canal in 1914, this slender spit of land abruptly became the linchpin of the fastest route between New York City and San Francisco—a route that combined travel by ship to the east coast of Panama, an overland crossing to Panama City, and a final voyage by ship to California. In Path of Empire, Aims McGuinness presents a novel understanding of the intertwined histories of the California Gold Rush, the course of U.S. empire, and anti-imperialist politics in Latin America. Between 1848 and 1856, Panama saw the building, by a U.S. company, of the first transcontinental railroad in world history, the final abolition of slavery, the establishment of universal manhood suffrage, the foundation of an autonomous Panamanian state, and the first of what would become a long list of military interventions by the United States.Using documents found in Panamanian, Colombian, and U.S. archives, McGuinness reveals how U.S. imperial projects in Panama were integral to developments in California and the larger process of U.S. continental expansion. Path of Empire offers a model for the new transnational history by unbinding the gold rush from the confines of U.S. history as traditionally told and narrating that event as the history of Panama, a small place of global importance in the mid-1800s.

The Age of Gold

The Age of Gold PDF Author: H. W. Brands
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307481220
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 594

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Book Description
From the two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, bestselling historian, and author of Our First Civil War—the epic story of the California Gold Rush, “a fine, robust telling of one of the greatest adventure stories in history" (David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of John Adams). The California Gold Rush inspired a new American dream—the “dream of instant wealth, won by audacity and good luck.” The discovery of gold on the American River in 1848 triggered the most astonishing mass movement of peoples since the Crusades. It drew fortune-seekers from the ends of the earth, accelerated America’s imperial expansion, and exacerbated the tensions that exploded in the Civil War. H.W. Brands tells his epic story from multiple perspectives: of adventurers John and Jessie Fremont, entrepreneur Leland Stanford, and the wry observer Samuel Clemens—side by side with prospectors, soldiers, and scoundrels. He imparts a visceral sense of the distances they traveled, the suffering they endured, and the fortunes they made and lost. Impressive in its scholarship and overflowing with life, The Age of Gold is history in the grand traditions of Stephen Ambrose and David McCullough.

The World Rushed In

The World Rushed In PDF Author: J. S. Holliday
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806183527
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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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.

Golden Rules

Golden Rules PDF Author: Mark Kanazawa
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022625870X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Fresh water has become scarce and will become even more so in the coming years, as continued population growth places ever greater demands on the supply of fresh water. At the same time, options for increasing that supply look to be ever more limited. No longer can we rely on technological solutions to meet growing demand. What we need is better management of the available water supply to ensure it goes further toward meeting basic human needs. But better management requires that we both understand the history underlying our current water regulation regime and think seriously about what changes to the law could be beneficial. For Golden Rules, Mark Kanazawa draws on previously untapped historical sources to trace the emergence of the current framework for resolving water-rights issues to California in the 1850s, when Gold Rush miners flooded the newly formed state. The need to circumscribe water use on private property in support of broader societal objectives brought to light a number of fundamental issues about how water rights ought to be defined and enforced through a system of laws. Many of these issues reverberate in today’s contentious debates about the relative merits of government and market regulation. By understanding how these laws developed across California’s mining camps and common-law courts, we can also gain a better sense of the challenges associated with adopting new property-rights regimes in the twenty-first century.

The Plains Across

The Plains Across PDF Author: John D. Unruh
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252063602
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 590

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Book Description
The most honored book ever released by the University of Illinois Press, The Plains Across was the result of more than a decade's work by its author. Here, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the opening of the Oregon Trail, is a paperback reissue that includes the notes, bibliography, and illustrations contained in the 1979 cloth edition.