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 321 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 The Townsend Family in the Emerging American West 1856 1926 written by Susan E. James and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-11-18 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the life of the Townsend family and the events that occurred during the period of 1856–1926 that shaped an expanding American West. Bryant and Julia (Riley) Townsend and their three children were born into an age of rapid change and competing cultures. Witnesses to a century of events that shaped a nation, their lives define the complexities and challenges of incomers who arrived in an expanding American West. From the Gold Rush to the California oil boom, from slavery to female suffrage, from Indian Wars to World Wars, the Townsends lived through violent upheavals, outlasting cities, societal beliefs and entire ways of life. Married in a mining camp in Nevada and relocating frequently, the couple embraced the momentary riches, shattering losses and personal disasters faced by a vast number of immigrants, foreign and domestic, striving to survive in an often-hostile landscape. Their lives and those of their three children, Minnie Edith, Bryant and Persia, form the architecture supporting an examination of multiple facets of the Western experience and are exemplars of the different populations that merged to form the American identity. This volume will be of value to students and scholars interested in American history, social and cultural history and modern history.
Download or read book Hellacious California written by Gary Noy and published by Heyday.ORIM. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Teems with bittersweet compounds of 19th-century nefariousness, including . . . gambling, knife fights, the demon drink, con artistry, and prostitution.” —Los Angeles Review of Books In 1855 an ex-miner lamented that nineteenth-century California “can and does furnish the best bad things,” including “purer liquors . . . finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier courtezans [sic]” than anywhere else in America. Lured by boons of gold and other exploitable resources, California’s settler population mushroomed under Mexican and early American control, and this period of rapid transformation gave rise to a freewheeling culture best epitomized by its entertainments. Hellacious California tours the rambunctious and occasionally appalling amusements of the Golden State: gambling, gun duels, knife fights, gracious dining and gluttony, prostitution, fandangos, cigars, con artistry, and the demon drink. Historian Gary Noy unearths myriad primary sources, many of which have never before been published, to spin his true tall tales that are by turns humorous and horrifying. Whether detailing the exploits of an inebriated stallion, gambling parlors as a reinforcement and subversion of racial norms, armed skirmishes over eggs, or the ins and outs of the “Spirit Lover” scam, Noy expertly situates these stories in the context of a live-for-the-moment society characterized by audacity, bigotry, and risk. “Confidently carries the reader into the everyday lives of early Californians. The focus on Californians’ popular pastimes . . . with an eye on vice, decadence, and scandal, makes this book a rowdy tour.” —Dr. Patrick Ettinger, Professor of History, California State University, Sacramento; Former Director of CSUS Public History Program and the Capital Campus Oral History Program
Download or read book California Historical Society Quarterly written by California Historical Society and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 888 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book News Notes of California Libraries written by California State Library and published by . This book was released on 1944 with total page 646 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vols. for 1971- include annual reports and statistical summaries.
Download or read book The Inventor and the Tycoon written by Edward Ball and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Chicago Tribune Noteworthy Book of the Year Nearly 140 years ago, in frontier California, photographer Eadweard Muybridge captured time with his camera and played it back on a flickering screen, inventing the breakthrough technology of moving pictures. Yet the visionary inventor Muybridge was also a murderer who killed coolly and meticulously, and his trial became a national sensation. Despite Muybridge’s crime, the artist’s patron, railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University, hired the photographer to answer the question of whether the four hooves of a running horse ever left the ground all at once—and together these two unlikely men launched the age of visual media. Written with style and passion by National Book Award-winner Edward Ball, this riveting true-crime tale of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads puts on display the virtues and vices of the great American West.
Download or read book California a Slave State written by Jean Pfaelzer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-27 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold history of slavery and resistance in California, from the Spanish missions, indentured Native American ranch hands, Indian boarding schools, Black miners, kidnapped Chinese prostitutes, and convict laborers to victims of modern trafficking “A searing survey of ‘250 years of human bondage’ in what is now the state of California. . . . Readers will be outraged.”—Publishers Weekly California owes its origins and sunny prosperity to slavery. Spanish invaders captured Indigenous people to build the chain of Catholic missions. Russian otter hunters shipped Alaska Natives—the first slaves transported into California—and launched a Pacific slave triangle to China. Plantation slaves were marched across the plains for the Gold Rush. San Quentin Prison incubated California’s carceral state. Kidnapped Chinese girls were sold in caged brothels in early San Francisco. Indian boarding schools supplied new farms and hotels with unfree child workers. By looking west to California, Jean Pfaelzer upends our understanding of slavery as a North-South struggle and reveals how the enslaved in California fought, fled, and resisted human bondage. In unyielding research and vivid interviews, Pfaelzer exposes how California gorged on slavery, an appetite that persists today in a global trade in human beings lured by promises of jobs but who instead are imprisoned in sweatshops and remote marijuana grows, or sold as nannies and sex workers. Slavery shreds California’s utopian brand, rewrites our understanding of the West, and redefines America’s uneasy paths to freedom.
Download or read book Re Dressing America s Frontier Past written by Peter Boag and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-09 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans have long cherished romantic images of the frontier and its colorful cast of characters, where the cowboys are always rugged and the ladies always fragile. But in this book, Peter Boag opens an extraordinary window onto the real Old West. Delving into countless primary sources and surveying sexological and literary sources, Boag paints a vivid picture of a West where cross-dressing—for both men and women—was pervasive, and where easterners as well as Mexicans and even Indians could redefine their gender and sexual identities. Boag asks, why has this history been forgotten and erased? Citing a cultural moment at the turn of the twentieth century—when the frontier ended, the United States entered the modern era, and homosexuality was created as a category—Boag shows how the American people, and thus the American nation, were bequeathed an unambiguous heterosexual identity.
Download or read book Hoyt s Issue written by and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book California Grizzly written by Tracy I. Storer and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1996-12-27 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The California Bear Flag and the University of California football team the Golden Bears emblemize the great animal that has been extinct in California since the 1920s but once numbered perhaps as many as ten thousand in the state. Forty years after its original publication, University of California Press proudly reissues California Grizzly, still the most comprehensive book on the bear's history in California. The lessons of the book resonate today as the issues of protection of wildlife habitat versus unfettered development of land for human use are debated with increasing urgency.
Download or read book Fourth Estate written by and published by . This book was released on 1922 with total page 996 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mary Edwards Bryan written by Canter Brown Jr. and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2015-10-28 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The publication of Manch in 1880 marked the beginning of Mary Edwards Bryan's rise to prominence as one of nineteenth-century America's best-known writers of mass-market fiction. At a time when women were discouraged from having jobs of their own, she made a name for herself as a thoughtful--and well-paid--editor. Despite her cultivated image as editor of Fashion Bazar and Sunny South, Bryan's early life was fraught with obstacles. In this finely crafted literary biography, Canter Brown Jr. and Larry Eugene Rivers examine Bryan's formative years in Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana, pairing historical insights with selections of her best writing to illustrate how the obstacles she overcame shaped what she wrote. She grew up on a frontier plantation and later lived through the upheavals of secession and war, disruptive affairs with authors and politicians, the tensions of emancipation, and pervading post-war economic disorder. Despite the oppressive men in her life--her abusive father and husband--as well as unabashed limitations regarding the role of women, Bryan ultimately achieved extraordinary literary accomplishments in New York and Atlanta. A story of celebrity amid scandal, success amid disaster, ambition amid despair, this book reintroduces to the world a courageous and creative talent who yearned to express herself while navigating the restrictive morals and conventions of Victorian society.
Download or read book African American Women Confront the West 1600 2000 written by Quintard Taylor and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2008-08-01 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconstructs the history of black women’s participation in western settlement “A stellar collection of essays by talented authors who explore fascinating topics.”—Journal of American Ethnic History African American Women Confront the West, 1600–2000 is the first major historical anthology on the topic. The editors argue that African American women in the West played active, though sometimes unacknowledged, roles in shaping the political, ideological, and social currents that have influenced the United States over the past three centuries. Contributors to this volume explore African American women’s life experiences in the West, their influences on the experiences of the region’s diverse peoples, and their legacy in rural and urban communities from Montana to Texas and from California to Kansas. The essayists explore what it has meant to be an African American woman, from the era of Spanish colonial rule in eighteenth-century New Mexico to the black power era of the 1960s and 1970s.
Download or read book A History of California Literature written by Blake Allmendinger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This History explores the historical periods, literary genres, and cultural movements of California.
Download or read book Chronicles of the Peripatetic Stone Family written by Robert David Stone and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Simon Stone was born in 1585 in Great Bromley, Essex, England. His parents were David Stone and Ursula. He married Joan Clarke in 1616 and they and their five children emigrated in 1635 and settled in Watertown, Massachusetts. Descendants and relatives lived in Massachusetts, Illinois, California and elsewhere.
Download or read book The Fantastic Life of Walter Murray Gibson written by Jacob Adler and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-09-30 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walter Murray Gibson is one of the most enigmatic personalities in nineteenth-century Hawaiian history. Michener and Day saw him as an engaging rogue and included him in their Rascals in Paradise along with buccaneer Bully Hayes and Captain Bligh. Gavan Daws portrayed him in A Dream of Islands as a romantic and compassionate man who rashly challenged the ascendant planter-missionary party at a decisive period in Hawaii’s political history. Imbued since youth with grandiose ideals and soaring flights of fantasy, Gibson pursued throughout his life the dream of an island utopia flourishing under his leadership The East Indies beckoned first, and there on the island of Sumatra Gibson sought his fortune, finding instead a Dutch prison cell on Java. Recast as a Mormon, the High Priest of Melchizedek and chosen emissary of Brigham Young, Gibson gathered his flock about him on the island of Lanai, and was judged by the church to deserve excommunication. He finally realized his dream as Kipikona, Kalakaua’s “Minister of Everything,” the most skilled politician of his day, only to be driven from office and publicly taunted with a hangman’s noose. Authors Adler and Kamins bring historical reality to this turbulent and controversial life story. Carefully researched and engagingly written, The Fantastic Life of Walter Murray Gibson shows the many sides of this man of myriad talents--adventurer, New York businessman, Washington lobbyist, scholar, newspaper editor, orator, rancher, consummate legislative leader, “Minister of Everything,” and, always, a dreamer who dared to reach for the sun.
Download or read book Harper s Book of Facts written by Charlton Thomas Lewis and published by . This book was released on 1906 with total page 1010 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
