Download or read book Dirty Deeds written by Nancy J. Taniguchi and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2016-10-27 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The California gold rush of 1849 created fortunes for San Francisco merchants, whose wealth depended on control of the city’s docks. But ownership of waterfront property was hotly contested. In an 1856 dispute over land titles, a county official shot an outspoken newspaperman, prompting a group of merchants to organize the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance. The committee, which met in secret, fed biased stories to the newspapers, depicting itself as a necessary substitute for incompetent law enforcement. But its actual purpose was quite different. In Dirty Deeds, historian Nancy J. Taniguchi draws on the 1856 Committee’s minutes—long lost until she unearthed them—to present the first clear picture of its actions and motivations. San Francisco’s real estate comprised a patchwork of land grants left from the Spanish and Mexican governments—grants that had been appropriated and sold over and over. Even after the establishment of a federal board in 1851 to settle the complicated California claims, land titles remained confused, and most of the land in the city belonged to no one. The acquisition of key waterfront properties in San Francisco by an ambitious politician motivated the thirty-odd merchants who called themselves “the Executives” of the Vigilance Committee to go directly after these parcels. Despite the organization’s assertion of working on behalf of law and order, its tactics—kidnapping, forced deportations, and even murder—went far beyond the bounds of law. For more than a century, scholars have accepted the vigilantes’ self-serving claims to honorable motives. Dirty Deeds tells the real story, in which a band of men took over a city in an attempt to control the most valuable land on the West Coast. Ranging far beyond San Francisco, the 1856 Vigilance Committee’s activities affected events on the East Coast, in Central America, and in courts throughout the United States even after the Civil War.
Download or read book Committee of Vigilance written by George R. Stewart and published by Boston : Houghton Mifflin. This book was released on 1964 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Memoirs of General William T Sherman written by William Tecumseh Sherman and published by . This book was released on 1875 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Bloody Bay written by Darren A.. Raspa and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bloody Bay follows the history of policing in nineteenth-century San Francisco, exploring the city's culture of popular justice, its multi-ethnic environment, and how the unique relationships formed between informal and formal policing created a more progressive policing environment than anywhere else in the nation.
Download or read book Vigilantes in Gold Rush San Francisco written by Robert M. Senkewicz and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book California 1849 1913 Or The Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty four Years Residence in that State written by L. H. Woolley and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-09-07 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Lynching Beyond Dixie written by Michael J. Pfeifer and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2013-03-16 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, scholars have explored much of the history of mob violence in the American South, especially in the years after Reconstruction. However, the lynching violence that occurred in American regions outside the South, where hundreds of persons, including Hispanics, whites, African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans died at the hands of lynch mobs, has received less attention. This collection of essays by prominent and rising scholars fills this gap by illuminating the factors that distinguished lynching in the West, the Midwest, and the Mid-Atlantic. The volume adds to a more comprehensive history of American lynching and will be of interest to all readers interested in the history of violence across the varied regions of the United States. Contributors are Jack S. Blocker Jr., Brent M. S. Campney, William D. Carrigan, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Dennis B. Downey, Larry R. Gerlach, Kimberley Mangun, Helen McLure, Michael J. Pfeifer, Christopher Waldrep, Clive Webb, and Dena Lynn Winslow.
Download or read book San Francisco 1846 1856 written by Roger W. Lotchin and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1974 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kathleen Gregory Klein traces female paid, professional private investigators in British, Canadian, and American novels, revealing that the detective novel is both a reflection of and potential barrier to social change for women. This edition adds sixty new female private eyes to the roster and includes an afterword that assesses the current state of the genre's new and old novels. A comprehensive bibliography and a character list update the field through mid-1994.
Download or read book Against the Vigilantes written by Dutch Charley Duane and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "His memoir, originally printed in the San Francisco Examiner in 1881, was located and edited by John Boessenecker. Now published for the first time in book form, it reveals a charismatic ruffian who played many roles: gunfighter, fire chief, politician, shoulder-striker, bare-knuckle boxer, gambler, saloon keeper, and land squatter."--BOOK JACKET. "Boessenecker's introduction provides information that is crucial in judging the actions of the vigilantes who moved against Duane and his cohorts. At the same time, Against the Vigilantes is cultural history, filled with details about the fires that swept early San Francisco, prizefighting, dueling, and urban machine politics in the decade before the Civil War."--Jacket.
Download or read book History of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1851 written by Mary Floyd Williams and published by Berkeldy : University of California Press. This book was released on 1921 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Vigilance Committee of 1856 written by James O'Meara and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-09-07 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The California Debris Commission written by Joseph Jeremiah Hagwood (Jr.) and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cosmopolitans written by Fred Rosenbaum and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Levi Strauss, A.L. Gump, Yehudi Menuhin, Gertrude Stein, Adolph Sutro, Congresswoman Florence Prag Kahn--Jewish people have been so enmeshed in life in and around San Francisco that their story is a chronicle of the metropolis itself. Since the Gold Rush, Bay Area Jews have countered stereotypes, working as farmers and miners, boxers and mountaineers. They were Gold Rush pioneers, Gilded Age tycoons, and Progressive Era reformers. Told through an astonishing range of characters and events, Cosmopolitans illuminates many aspects of Jewish life in the area: the high profile of Jewish women, extraordinary achievements in the business world, the cultural creativity of the second generation, the bitter debate about the proper response to the Holocaust and Zionism, and much more. Focusing in rich detail on the first hundred years after the Gold Rush, the book also takes the story up to the present day, demonstrating how unusually strong affinities for the arts and for the struggle for social justice have characterized this community even as it has changed over time. Cosmopolitans, set in the uncommonly diverse Bay Area, is a truly unique chapter of the Jewish experience in America.
Download or read book The Barbary Coast written by Herbert Asbury and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2022-08-17 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of the Barbary Coast properly begins with the gold rush to California in 1849. Owing almost entirely to the influx of gold-seekers and the horde of gamblers, thieves, harlots, politicians, and other felonious parasites who battened upon them, there arose a unique criminal district that for almost seventy years was the scene of more viciousness and depravity, but which at the same time possessed more glamour, than any other area of vice and iniquity on the American continent. The Barbary Coast is the chronicle of the birth of San Francisco. From all over the world practitioners of every vice stampeded for the blood and money of the gold fields. Gambling dens ran all day including Sundays. From noon to noon houses of prostitution offered girls of every age and race. This is the story of the banditry, opium bouts, tong wars, and corruption, from the eureka at Sutter’s Mill until the last bagnio closed its doors seventy years later.
Download or read book Demon of the Lost Cause written by Wesley Moody and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the end of the Civil War, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman was surprisingly more popular in the newly defeated South than he was in the North. Yet, only thirty years later, his name was synonymous with evil and destruction in the South, particularly as the creator and enactor of the “total war” policy. In Demon of the Lost Cause, Wesley Moody examines these perplexing contradictions and how they and others function in past and present myths about Sherman. Throughout this fascinating study of Sherman’s reputation, from his first public servant role as the major general for the state of California until his death in 1891, Moody explores why Sherman remains one of the most controversial figures in American history. Using contemporary newspaper accounts, Sherman’s letters and memoirs, as well as biographies of Sherman and histories of his times, Moody reveals that Sherman’s shifting reputation was formed by whoever controlled the message, whether it was the Lost Cause historians of the South, Sherman’s enemies in the North, or Sherman himself. With his famous “March to the Sea” in Georgia, the general became known for inventing a brutal warfare where the conflict is brought to the civilian population. In fact, many of Sherman’s actions were official tactics to be employed when dealing with guerrilla forces, yet Sherman never put an end to the talk of his innovative tactics and even added to the stories himself. Sherman knew he had enemies in the Union army and within the Republican elite who could and would jeopardize his position for their own gain. In fact, these were the same people who spread the word that Sherman was a Southern sympathizer following the war, helping to place the general in the South’s good graces. That all changed, however, when the Lost Cause historians began formulating revisions to the Civil War, as Sherman’s actions were the perfect explanation for why the South had lost. Demon of the Lost Cause reveals the machinations behind the Sherman myth and the reasons behind the acceptance of such myths, no matter who invented them. In the case of Sherman’s own mythmaking, Moody postulates that his motivation was to secure a military position to support his wife and children. For the other Sherman mythmakers, personal or political gain was typically the rationale behind the stories they told and believed. In tracing Sherman’s ever-changing reputation, Moody sheds light on current and past understanding of the Civil War through the lens of one of its most controversial figures.
Download or read book The Kearney Agitation in California written by Henry George and published by Literature and Knowledge Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-02 with total page 55 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Denis Kearney was mainly known as American labor agitator of 19th century, and one of the most important leaders of the anti-Chinese campaign in California. He began an agitation among the workingmen in 1877. His attacks being directed mostly against the rights of capital and the importation of Chinese labor. This book deals with the Kearney Agitation in California. "What has been going on in California is not out of the natural course of things. The forces that have produced these events have been developed, not imported. And as it seems to me that the same forces exist in other parts of the country, I cannot see why, essentially, the same movements may not soon begin elsewhere. It is this that makes these California experiences worthy of attention. Every result becomes in turn a cause; every event is the progenitor of future events. And it is probable that this California agitation marks the beginning of a new phase in our politics. Whatever be his future career, Kearney has already made what will be regarded by thousands and thousands of men, many of them of much greater abilities, as a dazzlingly brilliant success. An unknown drayman, destitute of advantages, without following or influence, he has, simply by appealing to popular discontent and arousing the uneasy timidity which is its correlative, risen to the rank of a great leader, and drunk the sweets of power and fame. He knows what it is to be the hero and the master of surging multitudes; to draw forth their applause by a word, to hush them into silence with a wave of his hand; to be garlanded with flowers; to be drawn in triumph through crowded streets; to be attended wherever he went by a retinue of reporters and correspondents; to rise every morning to find the newspapers filled with him; to have men, who would not have noticed him had he stuck to his dray, slink by night to his house, or solicit his favors by go-betweens; to look upon high officials as the creatures of his making; to be known and talked about, not merely through the whole country, but over the world! Whatever becomes of Kearney — and it would be rash to predict that his career is yet over — this lesson will not be lost: The wave rises, curls, and subsides, and, where was its white crest, are but some spumes of foam. But the impulse is perpetuated, and another wave swells up. When, under institutions that proclaim equality, masses of men, whose ambitions and tastes are aroused only to be crucified, find it a hard, bitter, degrading struggle even to live, is it to be expected that the sight of other men rolling in their millions will not excite discontent? And, when discontented men have votes, is it to be expected that the demagogue will not appeal to the discontent, for the sake of the votes? It is useless to blink the fact. Nothing is clearer, to whoever will look, than that the political equality from which we cannot recede, and the social inequality to which we are tending, cannot peacefully coexist. Nothing is surer than that all the inventions, and improvements, and discoveries, of which our time is so fruitful, are tending with irresistible force to carry mere political democracy into anarchy."
Download or read book George Hearst written by Matthew Bernstein and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2021-08-19 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rising from a Missouri boyhood and meager prospecting success to owning the most productive copper, silver, and gold mines in the world and being elected a United States senator, George Hearst (1820–91) spent decades veering between the heights of prosperity and the depths of financial ruin. In George Hearst: Silver King of the Gilded Age, Matthew Bernstein captures Hearst’s ascent, casting light on his actions during the Civil War, his tempestuous marriage to his cousin Phoebe, his role as disciplinarian and doting father to future media magnate William Randolph Hearst, and his devious methods of building the greatest mining empire in the West. Whether driving a pack of mules laden with silver from the Comstock Lode to San Francisco, bribing jurors in Pioche and Deadwood, or unearthing bonanzas in Utah and Montana Territories, Hearst’s cunning, energy, and industry were always evident, along with occasional glimmers of the villainy ascribed to him in the television series Deadwood. In this first full-length biography, George Hearst emerges in all his human dimensions and historical significance—an ambitious, complex, flawed, and quintessentially American character.
