Download or read book Alta California written by Nick Neely and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This national bestseller chronicles one man’s 650–mile trek on foot from San Diego to San Francisco—sure to appeal to readers of naturalist works like Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, Paul Thoreau’s On the Plain of Snakes, and Mark Kenyon’s That Wild Country. In 1769, an expedition led by Gaspar de Portolá sketched a route that would become, in part, the famous El Camino Real. It laid the foundation for the Golden State we know today, a place that remains as mythical and captivating as any in the world. Despite having grown up in California, Nick Neely realized how little he knew about its history. So he set off to learn it bodily, with just a backpack and a tent, trekking through stretches of California both lonely and urban. For twelve weeks, following the journal of expedition missionary Father Juan Crespí, Neely kept pace with the ghosts of the Portolá expedition—nearly 250 years later. Weaving natural and human history, Alta California relives Neely’s adventure, while telling a story of Native cultures and the Spanish missions that soon devastated them, and exploring the evolution of California and its landscape. The result is a collage of historical and contemporary California, of lyricism and pedestrian serendipity, and of the biggest issues facing California today—water, agriculture, oil and gas, immigration, and development—all of it one step at a time. “Rich in little–known history . . . Up the Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo county coasts, then inland into the Salinas Valley to Monterey Bay. Somewhere along here, the owl moons and woodpeckers do something you might not have thought possible in 2019: they make you fall, or refall, in love with California, ungrudgingly, wildfires and insane housing prices and all . . . What a journey, you think. What a state." —San Francisco Chronicle
Download or read book The History of Alta California written by Antonio Maria Osio and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1996-05-15 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antonio María Osio’s La Historia de Alta California was the first written history of upper California during the era of Mexican rule, and this is its first complete English translation. A Mexican-Californian, government official, and the landowner of Angel Island and Point Reyes, Osio writes colorfully of life in old Monterey, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and gives a first-hand account of the political intrigues of the 1830s that led to the appointment of Juan Bautista Alvarado as governor. Osio wrote his History in 1851, conveying with immediacy and detail the years of the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846–1848 and the social upheaval that followed. As he witnesses California’s territorial transition from Mexico to the United States, he recalls with pride the achievements of Mexican California in earlier decades and writes critically of the onset of U.S. influence and imperialism. Unable to endure life as foreigners in their home of twenty-seven years, Osio and his family left Alta California for Mexico in 1852. Osio’s account predates by a quarter century the better-known reminiscences of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and Juan Bautista Alvarado and the memoirs of Californios dictated to Hubert Howe Bancroft’s staff in the 1870s. Editors Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz have provided an accurate, complete translation of Osio’s original manuscript, and their helpful introduction and notes offer further details of Osio’s life and of society in Alta California.
Download or read book Gateway to Alta California written by Harry Crosby and published by Sunbelt Publications, Inc.. This book was released on 2003 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of this journey through northern Baja California's unexplored wilderness to San Diego is actually two stories, crafted by artful and incisive historian Harry Crosby. The first begins well before the expedition commences and involves world events, politics, and the characters who were destined to forge this momentous march. The second is a daily record of the trek itself, told through first-person diary excerpts and the author's own comments as he followed in their footsteps, mapping this historic route for the first time. Together, they show not only the hardships and victories of blazing the difficult trail, but the resolve of this company of fifty heroic men. Gateway to Alta California contains the author's color maps, which provide a graphic statement of the journey into terra incognita, as well as his black-and-white photos of the largely unchanged terrain. Also included are lists of all Hispanic members of the expedition party -- many identified here for the first time -- plus pertinent information on their backgrounds and future lives (including those who continued on in July of 1769 with Gaspar de Portola, seeking the port of Monterey). Book jacket.
Download or read book Narratives of Persistence written by Lee Panich and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narratives of Persistence charts the remarkable persistence of California's Ohlone and Paipai people over the past five centuries. Lee M. Panich draws connections between the events and processes of the deeper past and the way the Ohlone and Paipai today understand their own histories and identities.
Download or read book Women and the Conquest of California 1542 1840 written by Virginia M. Bouvier and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2004-08 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies of the Spanish conquest in the Americas traditionally have explained European-Indian encounters in terms of such factors as geography, timing, and the charisma of individual conquistadores. Yet by reconsidering this history from the perspective of gender roles and relations, we see that gender ideology was a key ingredient in the glue that held the conquest together and in turn shaped indigenous behavior toward the conquerors. This book tells the hidden story of women during the missionization of California. It shows what it was like for women to live and work on that frontierÑand how race, religion, age, and ethnicity shaped female experiences. It explores the suppression of women's experiences and cultural resistance to domination, and reveals the many codes of silence regarding the use of force at the missions, the treatment of women, indigenous ceremonies, sexuality, and dreams. Virginia Bouvier has combed a vast array of sourcesÑ including mission records, journals of explorers and missionaries, novels of chivalry, and oral historiesÑ and has discovered that female participation in the colonization of California was greater and earlier than most historians have recognized. Viewing the conquest through the prism of gender, Bouvier gives new meaning to the settling of new lands and attempts to convert indigenous peoples. By analyzing the participation of womenÑ both Hispanic and IndianÑ in the maintenance of or resistance to the mission system, Bouvier restores them to the narrative of the conquest, colonization, and evangelization of California. And by bringing these voices into the chorus of history, she creates new harmonies and dissonances that alter and enhance our understanding of both the experience and meaning of conquest.
Download or read book Alta California written by Steven W. Hackel and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010-11-16 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A set of probing and fascinating essays by leading scholars, Alta California illuminates the lives of missionaries and Indians in colonial California. With unprecedented depth and precision, the essays explore the interplay of race and culture among the diverse peoples adapting to the radical transformations of a borderland uneasily shared by natives and colonizers."—Alan Taylor, author of The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution "In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the missions of California and the communities that sprang up around them constituted a unique laboratory where ethnic, imperial, and national identities were molded and transformed. A group of distinguished scholars examine these identities through a variety of sources ranging from mission records and mitochondrial DNA to the historical memory of California's early history."—Andrés Reséndez, author of Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850
Download or read book The Franciscan Mission Architecture of Alta California written by Rexford Newcomb and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Elsewhere California written by Dana Johnson and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2012-06-01 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We first met Avery in two of the stories featured in Dana Johnson's award–winning collection Break Any Woman Down. As a young girl, she and her family escape the violent streets of Los Angeles to a more gentrified existence in suburban West Covina. This average life, filled with school, trips to 7–Eleven to gawk at Tiger Beat magazine, and family outings to Dodger Stadium, is soon interrupted by a past she cannot escape, personified in the guise of her violent cousin Keith. When Keith moves in with her family, he triggers a series of events that will follow Avery throughout her life: to her studies at USC, to her burgeoning career as a painter and artist, and into her relationship with a wealthy Italian who sequesters her in his glass–walled house in the Hollywood Hills. The past will intrude upon Avery's first gallery show, proving her mother's adage: Every goodbye aint gone. The dual–narrative of Elsewhere, California illustrates the complicated history of African Americans across the rolling basin of Los Angeles.
Download or read book Los Angeles Street Food written by Farley Elliott and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2015-07-20 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history and guidebook for locals and visitors who want to explore the flavorful delights of the nation’s street food capital—includes photos! Los Angeles is the uncontested street food champion of the United States, and it isn’t even a fair fight. Millions of hungry locals and tourists take to the streets to eat tacos, down bacon-wrapped hot dogs, and indulge in the latest offerings from a fleet of gourmet food trucks and vendors. Dating back to the late nineteenth century when tamale men first hawked their fare from pushcarts and wagons, street food is now a billion-dollar industry in L.A.—and it isn’t going anywhere! So hit the streets and dig in with local food writer Farley Elliott, who tackles the sometimes-dicey subject of street food and serves up all there is to know about the greasy, cheesy, spicy, and everything in between.
Download or read book Mean written by Myriam Gurba and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: True crime, memoir, and ghost story, Mean is the bold and hilarious tale of Myriam Gurba’s coming of age as a queer, mixed-race Chicana. Blending radical formal fluidity and caustic humor, Gurba takes on sexual violence, small towns, and race, turning what might be tragic into piercing, revealing comedy. This is a confident, intoxicating, brassy book that takes the cost of sexual assault, racism, misogyny, and homophobia deadly seriously. We act mean to defend ourselves from boredom and from those who would cut off our breasts. We act mean to defend our clubs and institutions. We act mean because we like to laugh. Being mean to boys is fun and a second-wave feminist duty. Being mean to men who deserve it is a holy mission. Sisterhood is powerful, but being mean is more exhilarating. Being mean isn't for everybody. Being mean is best practiced by those who understand it as an art form. These virtuosos live closer to the divine than the rest of humanity. They're queers. Myriam Gurba is a queer spoken-word performer, visual artist, and writer from Santa Maria, California. She's the author of Dahlia Season (2007, Manic D) which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, Wish You Were Me (2011, Future Tense Books), and Painting Their Portraits in Winter (2015, Manic D). She has toured with Sister Spit and her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach. She lives in Long Beach, where she teaches social studies to eighth-graders.
Download or read book Pio Pico written by Carlos Manuel Salomon and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2012-11-08 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two-time governor of Alta, California and prominent businessman after the U.S. annexation, Pío de Jesus Pico was a politically savvy Californio who thrived in both the Mexican and the American periods. This is the first biography of Pico, whose life vibrantly illustrates the opportunities and risks faced by Mexican Americans in those transitional years. Carlos Manuel Salomon breathes life into the story of Pico, who—despite his mestizo-black heritage—became one of the wealthiest men in California thanks to real estate holdings and who was the last major Californio political figure with economic clout. Salomon traces Pico’s complicated political rise during the Mexican era, leading a revolt against the governor in 1831 that swept him into that office. During his second governorship in 1845 Pico fought in vain to save California from the invading forces of the United States. Pico faced complex legal and financial problems under the American regime. Salomon argues that it was Pico’s legal struggles with political rivals and land-hungry swindlers that ultimately resulted in the loss of Pico’s entire fortune. Yet as the most litigious Californio of his time, he consistently demonstrated his refusal to become a victim. Pico is an important transitional figure whose name still resonates in many Southern California locales. His story offers a new view of California history that anticipates a new perspective on the multicultural fabric of the state.
Download or read book Lands of Promise and Despair written by Rose Marie Beebe and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2015-08-28 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This copious collection of reminiscences, reports, letters, and documents allows readers to experience the vast and varied landscape of early California from the viewpoint of its inhabitants. What emerges is not the Spanish California depicted by casual visitors—a culture obsessed with finery, horses, and fandangos—but an ever-shifting world of aspiration and tragedy, pride and loss. Conflicts between missionaries and soldiers, Indians and settlers, friends and neighbors spill from these pages, bringing the ferment of daily life into sharp focus.
Download or read book The Missions and Missionaries of California written by Zephyrin Engelhardt and published by . This book was released on 1908 with total page 716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprehensive history of the Jesuit, Franciscan, and Dominican missionaries in Lower California and of the Franciscans in Upper California.
Download or read book Indians Franciscans and Spanish Colonization written by Robert H. Jackson and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 1996-08 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A readable and succinct account of how Indians fared under their Spanish Franciscan colonizers.
Download or read book The Barbarian Nurseries written by Héctor Tobar and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-09-27 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 A Boston Globe Best Fiction Book of 2011 The great panoramic social novel that Los Angeles deserves—a twenty-first century, West Coast Bonfire of the Vanities by the only writer qualified to capture the city in all its glory and complexity With The Barbarian Nurseries, Héctor Tobar gives our most misunderstood metropolis its great contemporary novel, taking us beyond the glimmer of Hollywood and deeper than camera-ready crime stories to reveal Southern California life as it really is, across its vast, sunshiny sprawl of classes, languages, dreams, and ambitions. Araceli is the live-in maid in the Torres-Thompson household—one of three Mexican employees in a Spanish-style house with lovely views of the Pacific. She has been responsible strictly for the cooking and cleaning, but the recession has hit, and suddenly Araceli is the last Mexican standing—unless you count Scott Torres, though you'd never suspect he was half Mexican but for his last name and an old family photo with central L.A. in the background. The financial pressure is causing the kind of fights that even Araceli knows the children shouldn't hear, and then one morning, after a particularly dramatic fight, Araceli wakes to an empty house—except for the two Torres-Thompson boys, little aliens she's never had to interact with before. Their parents are unreachable, and the only family member she knows of is Señor Torres, the subject of that old family photo. So she does the only thing she can think of and heads to the bus stop to seek out their grandfather. It will be an adventure, she tells the boys. If she only knew . . . With a precise eye for the telling detail and an unerring way with character, soaring brilliantly and seamlessly among a panorama of viewpoints, Tobar calls on all of his experience—as a novelist, a father, a journalist, a son of Guatemalan immigrants, and a native Angeleno—to deliver a novel as broad, as essential, as alive as the city itself.
Download or read book Southland written by Nina Revoyr and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2003-04-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nina Revoyr brings us a compelling story of race, love, murder, and history against the backdrop of Los Angeles. —Winner of a 2004 American Library Association Stonewall Honor Award in Literature —Winner of the 2003 Lambda Literary Award —Nominated for an Edgar Award The plot line of Southland is the stuff of a James Ellroy or a Walter Mosley novel . . . But the climax fairly glows with the good-heartedness that Revoyr displays from the very first page. —Los Angeles Times Jackie Ishida’s grandfather had a store in Watts where four boys were killed during the riots in 1965, a mystery she attempts to solve. —New York Times Book Review, included in “Where Noir Lives in the City of Angels” Nina Revoyr brings us a compelling story of race, love, murder, and history against the backdrop of Los Angeles. A young Japanese-American woman, Jackie Ishida, is in her last semester of law school when her grandfather, Frank Sakai, dies unexpectedly. While trying to fulfill a request from his will, Jackie discovers that four black teenagers were killed in the store he ran during the Watts Riots of 1965—and that the murders were never solved or reported. Along with James Lanier, a cousin of one of the victims, she tries to piece together the story of the boys’ deaths. In the process, Jackie unearths the long-held secrets of her family’s history—and her own. Moving in and out of the past, from the shipping yards and internment camps of World War II; to the barley fields of the Crenshaw District in the 1930s; to the means streets of Watts in the 1960s; to the night spots and garment factories of the 1990s, Southland weaves a tale of Los Angeles in all of its faces and forms.
Download or read book Life in California During a Residence of Several Years in That Territory written by Alfred Robinson and published by Franklin Classics Trade Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
