In this vivid account of the birth of modern California, J.S. Holliday frames the gold rush years within the larger story of the state's transformation from the quietude of a Mexican hinterland in the 1840s to the forefront of entrepreneurial capitalism by the 1890s. No other state, no nation experienced such an adolescence of freedom and success. By 1883 California was hailed as "America, only more so." Holliday's boldly interpretive narrative has the authority and immediacy of an eyewitness account. This eminent historian recreates the masculine world of mining camps and rough cities,...
In this vivid account of the birth of modern California, J.S. Holliday frames the gold rush years within the larger story of the state's transformatio...
Lured by the astonishing accounts of the vast deposits of gold in California, Alonzo Delano (1806 74) of Ottawa, Illinois, bid farewell to his wife and children and joined the rush to El Dorado. For the next five months April to early September 1849 he persevered in writing his remarkably detailed diary, recounting his experiences among the more than thirty thousand goldseekers representing all thirty states who struggled across half of the continent to California s gold fields. With each entry the reader is drawn into the changing circumstances, from a hurried trailside burial of a comrade...
Lured by the astonishing accounts of the vast deposits of gold in California, Alonzo Delano (1806 74) of Ottawa, Illinois, bid farewell to his wife an...
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...
When "The World Rushed In" was first published in 1981, the "Washington Post" predicted, It seems unlikely that anyone will write a more comprehens...
