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California Exposures Envisioning Myth And History
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Book Synopsis California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History by : Richard White
Download or read book California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History written by Richard White and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2021 California Book Award (Californiana category) A brilliant California history, in word and image, from an award-winning historian and a documentary photographer. “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” This indelible quote from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance applies especially well to California, where legend has so thoroughly become fact that it is visible in everyday landscapes. Our foremost historian of the West, Richard White, never content to “print the legend,” collaborates here with his son, a talented photographer, in excavating the layers of legend built into California’s landscapes. Together they expose the bedrock of the past, and the history they uncover is astonishing. Jesse White’s evocative photographs illustrate the sites of Richard’s historical investigations. A vista of Drakes Estero conjures the darkly amusing story of the Drake Navigators Guild and its dubious efforts to establish an Anglo-Saxon heritage for California. The restored Spanish missions of Los Angeles frame another origin story in which California’s native inhabitants, civilized through contact with friars, gift their territories to white settlers. But the history is not so placid. A quiet riverside park in the Tulare Lake Basin belies scenes of horror from when settlers in the 1850s transformed native homelands into American property. Near the lake bed stands a small marker commemorating the Mussel Slough massacre, the culmination of a violent struggle over land titles between local farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1870s. Tulare is today a fertile agricultural county, but its population is poor and unhealthy. The California Dream lives elsewhere. The lake itself disappeared when tributary rivers were rerouted to deliver government-subsidized water to big agriculture and cities. But climate change ensures that it will be back—the only question is when.
Book Synopsis Octopus's Garden by : Benjamin T. Jenkins
Download or read book Octopus's Garden written by Benjamin T. Jenkins and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2023-07-10 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Southern California recovered from the collapse of the cattle industry in the 1860s, the arrival of railroads—attacked by newspapers as the greedy “octopus”—and the expansion of citrus agriculture transformed the struggling region into a vast, idealized, and prosperous garden. New groves of the latest citrus varieties and new towns like Riverside quickly grew directly along the tracks of transcontinental railroads. The influx of capital, industrial technology, and workers, especially people of color, energized Southern California and tied it more closely to the economy and culture of the United States than ever before. Benjamin Jenkins’s Octopus’s Garden argues that citrus agriculture and railroads together shaped the economy, landscape, labor systems, and popular image of Southern California. Orange and lemon growing boomed in the 1870s and 1880s while railroads linked the region to markets across North America and ended centuries of geographic isolation for the West Coast. Railroads competed over the shipment of citrus fruits from multiple counties engulfed by the orange empire, resulting in an extensive rail network that generated lucrative returns for grove owners and railroad businessmen in Southern California from the 1890s to the 1950s. While investment from white Americans, particularly wealthy New Englanders, formed the financial backbone of the Octopus’s Garden, citrus and railroads would not have thrived in Southern California without the labor of people of color. Many workers of color took advantage of the commercial developments offered by railroads and citrus to economically advance their families and communities; however, these people also suffered greatly under the constant realities of bodily harm, low wages, and political and social exclusion. Promoters of the railroads and citrus cooperatives touted California as paradise for white Americans and minimized the roles of non-white laborers by stereotyping them in advertisements and publications. These practices fostered conceptions of California’s racial hierarchy by praising privileged whites and maligning the workers who made them prosper. The Octopus’s Garden continues to shape Southern Californians’ understanding of their past. In bringing together multiple storylines, Jenkins provides a complex and fresh perspective on the impact of citrus agriculturalists and railroad companies in Southern Californian history.
Download or read book Backcountry Ghosts written by Josh Sides and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-04 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: California is an infamously tough place to be poor: home to about half of the entire nation's homeless population, burdened by staggering home prices and unsustainable rental rates, California is a state in crisis. But it wasn't always that way, as prize-winning historian Josh Sides reveals in Backcountry Ghosts. In 1862 President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, the most ambitious and sweeping social policy in the history of the United States. In the Golden State more than a hundred thousand people filed homesteading claims between 1863 and the late 1930s. More than sixty thousand Californians succeeded, claiming about ten million acres. In Backcountry Ghosts Josh Sides tells the histories of these Californian homesteaders, their toil and enormous patience, successes and failures, doggedness in the face of natural elements and disasters, and resolve to defend hard-earned land for themselves and their children. While some of these homesteaders were fulfilling the American Dream--that all Americans should have the opportunity to own land regardless of their background or station--others used the Homestead Act to add to already vast landholdings or control water or mineral rights. Sides recovers the fascinating stories of individual homesteaders in California, both those who succeeded and those who did not, and the ways they shaped the future of California and the American West. Backcountry Ghosts reveals the dangers of American dreaming in a state still reeling from the ambitions that led to the Great Recession.
Download or read book Elderflora written by Jared Farmer and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2022-10-18 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The epic story of the planet’s oldest trees and the making of the modern world Humans have always revered long-lived trees. But as historian Jared Farmer reveals in Elderflora, our veneration took a modern turn in the eighteenth century, when naturalists embarked on a quest to locate and precisely date the oldest living things on earth. The new science of tree time prompted travelers to visit ancient specimens and conservationists to protect sacred groves. Exploitation accompanied sanctification, as old-growth forests succumbed to imperial expansion and the industrial revolution. Taking us from Lebanon to New Zealand to California, Farmer surveys the complex history of the world’s oldest trees, including voices of Indigenous peoples, religious figures, and contemporary scientists who study elderflora in crisis. In a changing climate, a long future is still possible, Farmer shows, but only if we give care to young things that might grow old.
Book Synopsis New Women in the Old West by : Winifred Gallagher
Download or read book New Women in the Old West written by Winifred Gallagher and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting and previously untold history of the American West, as seen by the pioneering women who advocated for their rights amidst challenges of migration and settlement, and transformed the country in the process Between 1840 and 1910, hundreds of thousands of men and women traveled deep into the underdeveloped American West, lured by adventure, opportunity, and the spirit of Manifest Destiny. These settlers soon realized that survival in a new society required women to compromise eastern sensibilities and take on some of their husbands’ responsibilities. At a time when women had very few legal or economic--much less political--rights, these women soon proved just as essential as men to westward expansion. During the mid-nineteenth century, the traditional domestic model of womanhood shifted to include public service, with the women of the West becoming town mothers who established schools, churches, and philanthropies, while also coproviding for their families. They claimed their own homesteads and graduated from new, free coeducational colleges that provided career alternatives to marriage. In 1869, the men of the Wyoming Territory gave women the right to vote--partly to persuade more of them to move west--but with this victory in hand, western suffragists fought relentlessly until the rest of the region followed suit. By 1914 western women became the first American women to vote--a right still denied to women in every eastern state. In New Women in the Old West, Winifred Gallagher brings to life the riveting history of the little-known women--the White, Black, and Asian settlers, and the Native Americans and Hispanics they displaced--who played monumental roles in one of America's most transformative periods. Drawing on an extraordinary collection of research, Gallagher weaves together the striking legacy of the persistent individuals who not only created homes on weather-wracked prairies, but also played a vital, unrecognized role in the women's rights movement and forever redefined the "American woman."
Book Synopsis Making a Modern U.S. West by : Sarah Deutsch
Download or read book Making a Modern U.S. West written by Sarah Deutsch and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To many Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the West was simultaneously the greatest symbol of American opportunity, the greatest story of its history, and the imagined blank slate on which the country's future would be written. From the Spanish-American War in 1898 to the Great Depression's end, from the Mississippi to the Pacific, policymakers at various levels and large-scale corporate investors, along with those living in the West and its borderlands, struggled over who would define modernity, who would participate in the modern American West, and who would be excluded. In Making a Modern U.S. West Sarah Deutsch surveys the history of the U.S. West from 1898 to 1940. Centering what is often relegated to the margins in histories of the region--the flows of people, capital, and ideas across borders--Deutsch attends to the region's role in constructing U.S. racial formations and argues that the West as a region was as important as the South in constructing the United States as a "white man's country." While this racial formation was linked to claims of modernity and progress by powerful players, Deutsch shows that visions of what constituted modernity were deeply contested by others. This expansive volume presents the most thorough examination to date of the American West from the late 1890s to the eve of World War II.
Download or read book Backcountry Ghosts written by Josh Sides and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: California is an infamously tough place to be poor: home to about half of the entire nation’s homeless population, burdened by staggering home prices and unsustainable rental rates, California is a state in crisis. But it wasn’t always that way, as prize-winning historian Josh Sides reveals in Backcountry Ghosts. In 1862 President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, the most ambitious and sweeping social policy in the history of the United States. In the Golden State more than a hundred thousand people filed homesteading claims between 1863 and the late 1930s. More than sixty thousand Californians succeeded, claiming about ten million acres. In Backcountry Ghosts Josh Sides tells the histories of these Californian homesteaders, their toil and enormous patience, successes and failures, doggedness in the face of natural elements and disasters, and resolve to defend hard-earned land for themselves and their children. While some of these homesteaders were fulfilling the American Dream—that all Americans should have the opportunity to own land regardless of their background or station—others used the Homestead Act to add to already vast landholdings or control water or mineral rights. Sides recovers the fascinating stories of individual homesteaders in California, both those who succeeded and those who did not, and the ways they shaped the future of California and the American West. Backcountry Ghosts reveals the dangers of American dreaming in a state still reeling from the ambitions that led to the Great Recession.
Book Synopsis Who Killed Jane Stanford?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University by : Richard White
Download or read book Who Killed Jane Stanford?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University written by Richard White and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named One of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 by the Los Angeles Times A premier historian penetrates the fog of corruption and cover-up still surrounding the murder of a Stanford University founder to establish who did it, how, and why. In 1885 Jane and Leland Stanford cofounded a university to honor their recently deceased young son. After her husband’s death in 1893, Jane Stanford, a devoted spiritualist who expected the university to inculcate her values, steered Stanford into eccentricity and public controversy for more than a decade. In 1905 she was murdered in Hawaii, a victim, according to the Honolulu coroner’s jury, of strychnine poisoning. With her vast fortune the university’s lifeline, the Stanford president and his allies quickly sought to foreclose challenges to her bequests by constructing a story of death by natural causes. The cover-up gained traction in the murky labyrinths of power, wealth, and corruption of Gilded Age San Francisco. The murderer walked. Deftly sifting the scattered evidence and conflicting stories of suspects and witnesses, Richard White gives us the first full account of Jane Stanford’s murder and its cover-up. Against a backdrop of the city’s machine politics, rogue policing, tong wars, and heated newspaper rivalries, White’s search for the murderer draws us into Jane Stanford’s imperious household and the academic enmities of the university. Although Stanford officials claimed that no one could have wanted to murder Jane, we meet several people who had the motives and the opportunity to do so. One of these, we discover, also had the means.
Download or read book We Are the Land written by Damon B. Akins and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-02 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction -- A people of the land, a land for the people : Yuma -- Beach encounters : indigenous people and the age of exploration, 1540-1769 : San Diego -- "Our country before the Fernandino arrived was a forest" : native towns and Spanish missions in colonial California, 1769-1810 : Rome -- Working the land : entrepreneurial Indians and the markets of power, 1811-1849 : Sacramento -- "The white man would spoil everything" : indigenous people and the California gold rush, 1846-1873 : Ukiah -- Working for land: rancherias, reservations, and labor, 1870-1904 : Ishi Wilderness -- Friends and enemies : reframing progress, and fighting for sovereignty, 1905-1928 : Riverside -- Becoming the Indians of California : reorganization and justice, 1928-1954 : Los Angeles -- Reoccupying California : resistance and reclaiming the land, 1953-1985 : Berkeley and the East Bay -- Returning to the land : sovereignty, self-determination and revitalization since -- Conclusion : returns
Book Synopsis Managing California's Water by : Ellen Hanak
Download or read book Managing California's Water written by Ellen Hanak and published by Public Policy Instit. of CA. This book was released on 2011 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You by : Agustín Fuentes
Download or read book Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You written by Agustín Fuentes and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2015-05 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are three major myths of human nature: humans are divided into biological races; humans are naturally aggressive; and men and women are truly different in behavior, desires, and wiring. In an engaging and wide-ranging narrative, Agustín Fuentes counters these pervasive and pernicious myths about human behavior. Tackling misconceptions about what race, aggression, and sex really mean for humans, Fuentes incorporates an accessible understanding of culture, genetics, and evolution, requiring us to dispose of notions of “nature or nurture.” Presenting scientific evidence from diverse fields—including anthropology, biology, and psychology—Fuentes devises a myth-busting toolkit to dismantle persistent fallacies about the validity of biological races, the innateness of aggression and violence, and the nature of monogamy and differences between the sexes. A final chapter plus an appendix provide a set of take-home points on how readers can myth-bust on their own. Accessible, compelling, and original, this book is a rich and nuanced account of how nature, culture, experience, and choice interact to influence human behavior.
Book Synopsis Whitewashed Adobe by : William F. Deverell
Download or read book Whitewashed Adobe written by William F. Deverell and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-06-03 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicling the rise of Los Angeles through shifting ideas of race and ethnicity, William Deverell offers a unique perspective on how the city grew and changed. Whitewashed Adobe considers six different developments in the history of the city—including the cementing of the Los Angeles River, the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1924, and the evolution of America's largest brickyard in the 1920s. In an absorbing narrative supported by a number of previously unpublished period photographs, Deverell shows how a city that was once part of Mexico itself came of age through appropriating—and even obliterating—the region's connections to Mexican places and people. Deverell portrays Los Angeles during the 1850s as a city seething with racial enmity due to the recent war with Mexico. He explains how, within a generation, the city's business interests, looking for a commercially viable way to establish urban identity, borrowed Mexican cultural traditions and put on a carnival called La Fiesta de Los Angeles. He analyzes the subtle ways in which ethnicity came to bear on efforts to corral the unpredictable Los Angeles River and shows how the resident Mexican population was put to work fashioning the modern metropolis. He discusses how Los Angeles responded to the nation's last major outbreak of bubonic plague and concludes by considering the Mission Play, a famed drama tied to regional assumptions about history, progress, and ethnicity. Taking all of these elements into consideration, Whitewashed Adobe uncovers an urban identity—and the power structure that fostered it—with far-reaching implications for contemporary Los Angeles.
Book Synopsis California Myths and Legends by : Ray Jones
Download or read book California Myths and Legends written by Ray Jones and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-04-01 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are the Santa Lucia Mountains really inhabited by shadowy Dark Watchers? Is the labyrinthine Winchester House still inhabited by the reclusive widow who masterminded its construction? And how did a sewing machine salesman make good on his promise to end a terrible drought in Southern California? From Mount Shasta’s legendary Lemurians to battles with alien spacecraft, California Myths and Legends of makes history fun and pulls back the curtain on some of the Golden State’s most fascinating and compelling stories.
Book Synopsis Northern Archaeology and Cosmology by : Vesa-Pekka Herva
Download or read book Northern Archaeology and Cosmology written by Vesa-Pekka Herva and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-28 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In its analysis of the archaeologies and histories of the northern fringe of Europe, this book provides a focus on animistic–shamanistic cosmologies and the associated human–environment relations from the Neolithic to modern times. The North has fascinated Europeans throughout history, as an enchanted world of natural and supernatural marvels: a land of light and dark, of northern lights and the midnight sun, of witches and magic and of riches ranging from amber to oil. Northern lands conflate fantasies and realities. Rich archaeological, historical, ethnographic and folkloric materials combine in this book with cutting-edge theoretical perspectives drawn from relational ontologies and epistemologies, producing a fresh approach to the prehistory and history of a region that is pivotal to understanding Europe-wide processes, such as Neolithization and modernization. This book examines the mythical and actual northern worlds, with northern relational modes of perceiving and engaging with the world on the one hand and the ‘place’ of the North in European culture on the other. This book is an indispensable read for scholars of archaeology, anthropology, cultural studies and folklore in northern Europe, as well as researchers interested in how the North is intertwined with developments in the broader European and Eurasian world. It provides a deep-time understanding of globally topical issues and conflicting interests, as expressed by debates and controversies around Arctic resources, nature preservation and indigenous rights.
Book Synopsis An Atlas of Geographical Wonders by : Gilles Palsky
Download or read book An Atlas of Geographical Wonders written by Gilles Palsky and published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to catalog comparative maps and tableaux that visualize the heights and lengths of the world's mountains and rivers. Produced predominantly in the nineteenth century, these beautifully rendered maps emerged out of the tide of exploration and scientific developments in measuring techniques. Beginning with the work of explorer Alexander von Humboldt, these historic drawings reveal a world of artistic and imaginative difference. Many of them give way—and with visible joy—to the power of fantasy in a mesmerizing array of realistic and imaginary forms. Most of the maps are from the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection at Stanford University.
Book Synopsis Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest by : Katharine Berry Judson
Download or read book Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest written by Katharine Berry Judson and published by Trieste Publishing. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trieste Publishing has a massive catalogue of classic book titles. Our aim is to provide readers with the highest quality reproductions of fiction and non-fiction literature that has stood the test of time. The many thousands of books in our collection have been sourced from libraries and private collections around the world.The titles that Trieste Publishing has chosen to be part of the collection have been scanned to simulate the original. Our readers see the books the same way that their first readers did decades or a hundred or more years ago. Books from that period are often spoiled by imperfections that did not exist in the original. Imperfections could be in the form of blurred text, photographs, or missing pages. It is highly unlikely that this would occur with one of our books. Our extensive quality control ensures that the readers of Trieste Publishing's books will be delighted with their purchase. Our staff has thoroughly reviewed every page of all the books in the collection, repairing, or if necessary, rejecting titles that are not of the highest quality. This process ensures that the reader of one of Trieste Publishing's titles receives a volume that faithfully reproduces the original, and to the maximum degree possible, gives them the experience of owning the original work.We pride ourselves on not only creating a pathway to an extensive reservoir of books of the finest quality, but also providing value to every one of our readers. Generally, Trieste books are purchased singly - on demand, however they may also be purchased in bulk. Readers interested in bulk purchases are invited to contact us directly to enquire about our tailored bulk rates.
Download or read book Words of Light written by Eduardo Cadava and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here Eduardo Cadava demonstrates that Walter Benjamin articulates his conception of history through the language of photography. Focusing on Benjamin's discussions of the flashes and images of history, he argues that the questions raised by this link between photography and history touch on issues that belong to the entire trajectory of his writings: the historical and political consequences of technology, the relation between reproduction and mimesis, images and history, remembering and forgetting, allegory and mourning, and visual and linguistic representation. The book establishes the photographic constellation of motifs and themes around which Benjamin organizes his texts and thereby becomes a lens through which we can begin to view his analysis of the convergence between the new technological media and a revolutionary concept of historical action and understanding. Written in the form of theses--what Cadava calls "snapshots in prose"--the book memorializes Benjamin's own thetic method of writing. It enacts a mode of conceiving history that is neither linear nor successive, but rather discontinuous--constructed from what Benjamin calls "dialectical images." In this way, it not only suggests the essential rapport between the fragmentary form of Benjamin's writing and his effort to write a history of modernity but it also skillfully clarifies the relation between Benjamin and his contemporaries, the relation between fascism and aesthetic ideology. It gives us the most complete picture to date of Benjamin's reflections on history.
