Kategoria BISAC: History >> United States - State & Local - West (AK, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, NV, UT, WY)

The 1846-1848 Mahele (division) transformed the lands of Hawai'i from a shared value into private property, but left many issues unresolved. Kauikeaouli (Kamehameha III) agreed to the Mahele, which divided all land among the mo'i (king), the ali'i (chiefs), and the maka'ainana (commoners), in the hopes of keeping the lands in Hawaiian hands even if a foreign power claimed sovereignty over the Islands. The king's share was further divided into Government and Crown Lands, the latter managed personally by the ruler until a court decision in 1864 and a statute passed in 1865 declared that they...

Ma'i Lepera attempts to recover Hawaiian voices at a significant moment in Hawai'i's history. It takes an unprecedented look at the Hansen's disease outbreak (1865-1900) almost exclusively from the perspective of "patients," ninety percent of whom were Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian). Using traditional and nontraditional sources, published and unpublished, it tells the story of a disease, a society's reaction to it, and the consequences of the experience for Hawai'i and its people.

Over a span of thirty-four years more than five thousand people were sent to a leprosy settlement on the...

When health officials in San Francisco discovered bubonic plague in their city's Chinatown in 1900, they responded with intrusive, controlling, and arbitrary measures that touched off a sociocultural conflict still relevant today. Guenter B. Risse's history of an epidemic is the first to incorporate the voices of those living in Chinatown at the time, including the desperately ill Wong Chut King, believed to be the first person infected.

Lasting until 1904, the plague in San Francisco's Chinatown reignited racial prejudices, renewed efforts to remove the Chinese from their district,...

From the 18th century, African Americans, like many others, have migrated to California to seek fortunes or, often, the more modest goals of being able to find work, own a home, and raise a family relatively free of discrimination. Not only their search but also its outcome is covered in Seeking El Dorado. Whether they settled in major cities or smaller towns, African Americans created institutions and organizations--churches, social clubs, literary societies, fraternal orders, civil rights organizations--that embodied the legacy of their past and the values they shared. Blacks came...

In The Color of America Has Changed, Mark Brilliant examines California's history to illustrate how the civil rights era was a truly nationwide and multiracial phenomenon-one that was shaped and complicated by the presence of not only blacks and whites, but also Mexican Americans, Japanese Americans, and Chinese...

This account of the life of Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel follows his beginnings in the Lower East Side of New York to his role in the development of the famous Flamingo Hotel and Casino. Larry D. Gragg examines Siegel's image as portrayed in popular culture, dispels the myths about Siegel's contribution to the founding of Las Vegas, and reveals some of the more lurid details about his life.

Unlike previous biographies, this book is the first to make use of more than 2,400 pages of FBI files on Siegel, referencing documents about the reputed gangster in the New York City Municipal Archives...

In the 1940s, Japanese and Japanese American internees of Redwood City, CA, had a dedicated ally: J. Elmer Morrish, a banker who kept their businesses alive, made sure their taxes were paid, and safeguarded their properties until after the end of World War II and the internees were finally released. What were Morrish's motivations for his tireless efforts to help the internees? How did the unjustly incarcerated deal with the loss of freedom in the camps, and how did they envision their future? And how did the internees both cooperate with the U.S. government and attempt to resist...

First published in 1994 and now available again, this Spanish Borderlands classic recounts Jesuit colonization of the Old California, the peninsula now known as Baja California. Jesuit missionaries founded their first settlement in 1697 and unintentionally created a Hispanic society that outlived the missions and their Indian converts. The author brings to light Jesuit missionization and culture, European-Indian contacts, mission and presidio operations, family social life, the unique peninsular economy, and the Jesuit expulsion. Four appendices provide data on Spanish kings, royal...

Newly created territories in antebellum America were designed to be extensions of national sovereignty and jurisdiction. Utah Territory, however, was a deeply contested space in which a cohesive settler group--the Mormons--sought to establish their own "popular sovereignty," raising the question of who possessed and could exercise governing, legal, social, and even cultural power in a newly acquired territory.

In Unpopular Sovereignty, Brent M. Rogers invokes the case of popular sovereignty in Utah as an important contrast to the better-known slavery question in Kansas....