California s early history was both colorful and turbulent. After Europeans first explored the region in the sixteenth century, it was conquered and colonized by successive waves of adventurers and settlers. In "Contest for California," award-winning author Stephen G. Hyslop draws on a wide array of primary sources to weave an elegant narrative of this epic struggle for control of the territory that many saw as a beautiful, sprawling land of promise.
In vivid detail, Hyslop traces the story of early California from its founding in 1769 by Spanish colonists to its annexation in 1848 by the...

First published in 1981, Harry W. Crosby's Last of the Californios captured the history of the mountain people of Baja California during a critical moment of transition, when the 1974 completion of the transpeninsular highway increased the Californios' contact with the outside world and profoundly affected their traditional way of life. This updated and expanded version of that now-classic work incorporates the fruits of further investigation into the Californios' lives and history, by Crosby and others. The result is the most thorough and extensive account of the people of Baja...

Indian labor was vital to the early economic development of the Los Angeles region. This first volume in the series Before Gold: California under Spain and Mexico explores for the first time Native contributions to early Southern California.

Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (1807–90) grew up in Spanish California, became a leading military and political figure in Mexican California, and participated in some of the founding events of U.S. California. In 1874–75, Vallejo, working with historian and publisher Hubert Howe Bancroft, composed a five-volume history of Alta California—a monumental work that would be the most complete eyewitness account of California before the gold rush. But Bancroft shelved the work, and it has lain in the archives until its recent publication as Recuerdos: Historical and Personal Remembrances Relating...