This book focuses on the experience of the Californian Gold Rush of 1849 1850, not in terms of what happened (a subject much covered by historians) but in terms of how people of various levels of sophistication wrote about it. Drawing on a variety of sources - diaries, journals, letters, and contemporary journalism - Dr Fender explores how both amateur and professional writers attempted to come to terms with the physical wilderness of the transcontinental landscape and the social wilderness of early California. Dr Fender has produced an intriguing and highly readable book, which should prove...

Working through close rhetorical analysis of everything from fiction and journalism to documents and documentaries, this book looks at how popular memory favors the country depression over the economic crisis in the nation's cities and factories.

The land of the free and home of the brave, America is also the country in which this truth is supposedly self-evident: that we are all equal. It may not seem so at first, but there is a startling gap between these two visions of America, one more evident in today s fiercely partisan politics that pit free enterprise against social justice. In this fascinating look at America s most memorable speeches which have become monuments in national memory Stephen Fender explores the ways American speechcraft has kept alive a dream of equality and cooperation in the face of economic forces that have...