Download or read book A Life Wild and Perilous written by Robert M. Utley and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[This] richly documented book is the definitive study of the decisive role mountain men played in the exploration and expansion of the Western frontier.” —Jay P. Dolan, The New York Times Book Review Early in the nineteenth century, the mountain men emerged as a small but distinctive group whose knowledge and experience of the trans-Mississippi West extended the national consciousness to continental dimensions. Though Lewis and Clark blazed a narrow corridor of geographical reality, the West remained largely terra incognita until trappers and traders—such as Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Tom Fitzpatrick, and Jedediah Smith—opened paths through the snow-choked mountain wilderness. These and other Mountain Men opened the way west to Fremont and played a major role in the pivotal years of 1845–1848 when Texas was annexed, the Oregon question was decided, and the Mexican War ended with the Southwest and California in American hands—thus making the Pacific Ocean America’s western boundary.

Download or read book A History of Wine in America from the Beginnings to Prohibition written by Thomas Pinney and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1989-01-01 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the story of vitaculture and winemaking in America and discusses the individuals, organizations and institutions associated with the enterprise

Download or read book A History of Wine in America Volume 1 written by Thomas Pinney and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-09-17 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Vikings called North America "Vinland," the land of wine. Giovanni de Verrazzano, the Italian explorer who first described the grapes of the New World, was sure that "they would yield excellent wines." And when the English settlers found grapes growing so thickly that they covered the ground down to the very seashore, they concluded that "in all the world the like abundance is not to be found." Thus, from the very beginning the promise of America was, in part, the alluring promise of wine. How that promise was repeatedly baffled, how its realization was gradually begun, and how at last it has been triumphantly fulfilled is the story told in this book. It is a story that touches on nearly every section of the United States and includes the whole range of American society from the founders to the latest immigrants. Germans in Pennsylvania, Swiss in Georgia, Minorcans in Florida, Italians in Arkansas, French in Kansas, Chinese in California—all contributed to the domestication of Bacchus in the New World. So too did innumerable individuals, institutions, and organizations. Prominent politicians, obscure farmers, eager amateurs, sober scientists: these and all the other kinds and conditions of American men and women figure in the story. The history of wine in America is, in many ways, the history of American origins and of American enterprise in microcosm. While much of that history has been lost to sight, especially after Prohibition, the recovery of the record has been the goal of many investigators over the years, and the results are here brought together for the first time. In print in its entirety for the first time, A History of Wine in America is the most comprehensive account of winemaking in the United States, from the Norse discovery of native grapes in 1001 A.D., through Prohibition, and up to the present expansion of winemaking in every state.

Download or read book Octopus s Garden written by Benjamin T. Jenkins and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2023-07-10 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Southern California recovered from the collapse of the cattle industry in the 1860s, the arrival of railroads—attacked by newspapers as the greedy “octopus”—and the expansion of citrus agriculture transformed the struggling region into a vast, idealized, and prosperous garden. New groves of the latest citrus varieties and new towns like Riverside quickly grew directly along the tracks of transcontinental railroads. The influx of capital, industrial technology, and workers, especially people of color, energized Southern California and tied it more closely to the economy and culture of the United States than ever before. Benjamin Jenkins’s Octopus’s Garden argues that citrus agriculture and railroads together shaped the economy, landscape, labor systems, and popular image of Southern California. Orange and lemon growing boomed in the 1870s and 1880s while railroads linked the region to markets across North America and ended centuries of geographic isolation for the West Coast. Railroads competed over the shipment of citrus fruits from multiple counties engulfed by the orange empire, resulting in an extensive rail network that generated lucrative returns for grove owners and railroad businessmen in Southern California from the 1890s to the 1950s. While investment from white Americans, particularly wealthy New Englanders, formed the financial backbone of the Octopus’s Garden, citrus and railroads would not have thrived in Southern California without the labor of people of color. Many workers of color took advantage of the commercial developments offered by railroads and citrus to economically advance their families and communities; however, these people also suffered greatly under the constant realities of bodily harm, low wages, and political and social exclusion. Promoters of the railroads and citrus cooperatives touted California as paradise for white Americans and minimized the roles of non-white laborers by stereotyping them in advertisements and publications. These practices fostered conceptions of California’s racial hierarchy by praising privileged whites and maligning the workers who made them prosper. The Octopus’s Garden continues to shape Southern Californians’ understanding of their past. In bringing together multiple storylines, Jenkins provides a complex and fresh perspective on the impact of citrus agriculturalists and railroad companies in Southern Californian history.

Download or read book The World of the American West 2 volumes written by Gordon Morris Bakken and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-12-12 with total page 778 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addressing everything from the details of everyday life to recreation and warfare, this two-volume work examines the social, political, intellectual, and material culture of the American "Old West," from the California Gold Rush of 1849 to the end of the 19th century. What was life really like for ordinary people in the Old West? What did they eat, wear, and think? How did they raise their children? How did they interact with government? What did they do for fun? This encyclopedia provides readers with an engaging and detailed portrayal of the Old West through the examination of social, cultural, and material history. Supported by the most current research, the multivolume set explores various aspects of social history—family, politics, religion, economics, and recreation—to illuminate aspects of a society's emotional life, interactions, opinions, views, beliefs, intimate relationships, and connections between the individual and the greater world. Readers will be exposed to both objective reality and subjective views of a particular culture; as a result, they can create a cohesive, accurate impression of life in the Old West during the second half of the 1800s.

Download or read book The City of Vines written by Thomas Pinney and published by Heyday.ORIM. This book was released on 2017-12-07 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of A History of Wine in America recounts the beginnings of California’s wine trade in the once isolated pueblo now called Los Angeles. Winner of the 2016 California Historical Society Book Award! With incisive analysis and a touch of dry humor, The City of Vines chronicles winemaking in Los Angeles from its beginnings in the late eighteenth century through its decline in the 1950s. Thomas Pinney returns the megalopolis to the prickly pear-studded lands upon which Mission grapes grew for the production of claret, port, sherry, angelica, and hock. From these rural beginnings Pinney reconstructs the entire course of winemaking in a sweeping narrative, punctuated by accounts of particular enterprises including Anaheim’s foundation as a German winemaking settlement and the undertakings of vintners scrambling for market dominance. Yet Pinney also shows Los Angeles’s wine industry to be beholden to the forces that shaped all California under the flags of Spain, Mexico, and the United States: colonial expansion dependent on labor of indigenous peoples; the Gold Rush population boom; transcontinental railroads; rapid urbanization; and Prohibition. This previously untold story uncovers an era when California wine meant Los Angeles wine, and reveals the lasting ways in which the wine industry shaped the nascent metropolis.

Download or read book The Pacific Historical Review written by Anna Marie Hager and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1976 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Trees in Paradise written by Jared Farmer and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-10-28 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes how the first settlers in California changed the brown landscape there by creating groves, wooded suburbs and landscaped cities through planting eucalypts in the lowlands, citrus colonies in the south and palms in Los Angeles.

Download or read book Studies in Pacific History written by Dennis O. Flynn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-18 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first published in 2002.In recent years scholars have begun to conceptualize the history of the Pacific Ocean as a subset of world history. This question is taken up in the introductory chapter of this volume, which sets out four periods of modern Pacific history: a silver period, 1570s-1750; a period of early integration, 1750-1850; a gold period, 1850-c.1900; and a period of imperial strategies after the gold rushes. The next chapter looks at the fur trade of the Pacific coast of America, and its dependence on markets in China and Russia, followed by a set which focus on the era of the gold rushes, in California, Australia and New Zealand, when the pace of Pacific integration grew rapidly and new markets opened across the ocean. The last chapters examine aspects of the subsequent evolution of the Pacific Ocean into an ’American lake’, looking in particular at the interlocking of politics and migration. This volume carries forward study of the ’Pacific Centuries’, promoting the conceptualization of the Pacific Ocean as a coherent unit of analysis, and providing further important steps toward provision of the multi-century framework that is required for proper understanding of today’s ’Pacific Century’.

Download or read book Trees in Paradise A California History written by Jared Farmer and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-10-28 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From roots to canopy, a lush, verdant history of the making of California. California now has more trees than at any time since the late Pleistocene. This green landscape, however, is not the work of nature. It’s the work of history. In the years after the Gold Rush, American settlers remade the California landscape, harnessing nature to their vision of the good life. Horticulturists, boosters, and civic reformers began to "improve" the bare, brown countryside, planting millions of trees to create groves, wooded suburbs, and landscaped cities. They imported the blue-green eucalypts whose tangy fragrance was thought to cure malaria. They built the lucrative "Orange Empire" on the sweet juice and thick skin of the Washington navel, an industrial fruit. They lined their streets with graceful palms to announce that they were not in the Midwest anymore. To the north the majestic coastal redwoods inspired awe and invited exploitation. A resource in the state, the durable heartwood of these timeless giants became infrastructure, transformed by the saw teeth of American enterprise. By 1900 timber firms owned the entire redwood forest; by 1950 they had clear-cut almost all of the old-growth trees. In time California’s new landscape proved to be no paradise: the eucalypts in the Berkeley hills exploded in fire; the orange groves near Riverside froze on cold nights; Los Angeles’s palms harbored rats and dropped heavy fronds on the streets below. Disease, infestation, and development all spelled decline for these nonnative evergreens. In the north, however, a new forest of second-growth redwood took root, nurtured by protective laws and sustainable harvesting. Today there are more California redwoods than there were a century ago. Rich in character and story, Trees in Paradise is a dazzling narrative that offers an insightful, new perspective on the history of the Golden State and the American West.

Download or read book The Army Surveys of Gold Rush California written by Gary Clayton Anderson and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2015-04-06 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected and reproduced here for the first time, these journals and maps offer a new and unique perspective on California in the mid-nineteenth century. Derby’s reports and journals appear alongside those of Robert Stockton Williamson, William H. Warner, Edward O. C. Ord, Nathaniel Lyon, Henry Walton Wessells, and Erasmus Darwin Keyes. These documents offer extraordinary firsthand views of the environment, natural resources, geography, and early settlement, as well as the effects of disease on Native and white populations.

Download or read book The American Fur Trade of the Far West written by Hiram Martin Chittenden and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1986-06-01 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American Fur Trade of the Far West is the premier history of its subject. Its publication in 1902 invited historians and general readers to look more closely at the intricate connec-tions of the fur trade with the development of North America. Hiram Chittenden provides a perspective or overall outline of the fur trade that, after nearly a century, remains sound. Volume 2 of this Bison Book edition follows the traps and trails of such colorful characters as Ezekial Williams, Hugh Glass, Mike Fink, and John Colter. Described here are the explorers, missionaries, government survey parties, and Indian tribes of the fur trade West, and the geography that often determined their success or failure. Nine appendixes containing miscellaneous primary materials precede a bibliography and index. A new feature is a foreword by William R. Swagerty.

Download or read book Catalog of Copyright Entries Third Series written by Library of Congress. Copyright Office and published by Copyright Office, Library of Congress. This book was released on 1968 with total page 1296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes Part 1, Number 2: Books and Pamphlets, Including Serials and Contributions to Periodicals July - December)

Download or read book The Settlement of America written by James A. Crutchfield and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-26 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2015. This encyclopaedic collection includes Volumes 1 (A-L) and 2 (M-Z) as well as essays on the settlement of America. It can be argued that the westward expansion occurred only one week after the English landfall at Jamestown, Virginia, on May 14, 1607. Beginning on May 21, Captain John Smith, one of the colonization company’s leaders, and twenty-one companions made their way northwest up the James River for some 50 or 60 miles (80 or 96 km).

Download or read book Harvard Guide to American History written by Frank Freidel and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1974 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Editions for 1954 and 1967 by O. Handlin and others.

Download or read book Collisions at the Crossroads written by Genevieve Carpio and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are few places where mobility has shaped identity as widely as the American West, but some locations and populations sit at its major crossroads, maintaining control over place and mobility, labor and race. In Collisions at the Crossroads, Genevieve Carpio argues that mobility, both permission to move freely and prohibitions on movement, helped shape racial formation in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles and the Inland Empire throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By examining policies and forces as different as historical societies, Indian boarding schools, bicycle ordinances, immigration policy, incarceration, traffic checkpoints, and Route 66 heritage, she shows how local authorities constructed a racial hierarchy by allowing some people to move freely while placing limits on the mobility of others. Highlighting the ways people of color have negotiated their place within these systems, Carpio reveals a compelling and perceptive analysis of spatial mobility through physical movement and residence.

Download or read book East Los Angeles written by Richardo Romo and published by Univ of TX + ORM. This book was released on 2010-07-05 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of the largest Mexican-American community in the United States, the city within a city known as "East Los Angeles." How did this barrio of over one million men and women—occupying an area greater than Manhattan or Washington D.C.—come to be? Although promoted early in this century as a workers' paradise, Los Angeles fared poorly in attracting European immigrants and American blue-collar workers. Wages were low, and these workers were understandably reluctant to come to a city which was also troubled by labor strife. Mexicans made up the difference, arriving in the city in massive numbers. Who these Mexicans were and the conditions that caused them to leave their own country are revealed in East Los Angeles. The author examines how they adjusted to life in one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States, how they fared in this country's labor market, and the problems of segregation and prejudice they confronted. Ricardo Romo is associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.