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"The process by which two neighborhood butchers turned themselves into landed industrialists depended to an extraordinary degree on the acquisition, manipulation, and exploitation of natural resources. Igler examines the broader impact of western industrialism - as exemplified by Miller & Lux - on landscapes and waterscapes, bringing to the forefront the important issues of land reclamation, water politics, San Francisco's unique business environment, and the city's relation to its surrounding hinterlands. He provides a rich discussion of the social relations engineered by Miller & Lux, from the dispossession of Californio rancheros to the ethnic segmentation of the firm's massive labor force."--Jacket.
The “important . . . meticulously researched” prize-winning biography of the pre-eminent Polish star of the nineteenth century global stage (CosmopolinReview.com). In reintroducing “a little-remembered actress to a new American audience” biographer Beth Holgram delivers a revelatory portrait of Helena Modjeska—from unparalleled European success to her reign as the most acclaimed, and most recognized female celebrity in the late nineteenth-century United States. In 1876, Poland’s leading actress, Helena Modrzejewska, accompanied by her husband, the self-stylized Count Bozente, emigrated to southern California to give up her career and establish a utopian commune. In light of its f...
Twenty-eight men and women recall their experiences as the raw, newly born city of sandhills and gambling saloons matures into a metropolis of elegant homes and bustling factories. These voices from the past tell us of Life during the Civil War. -- Living under vigilante justice. -- Globe-trotting tourists on visits to Barbary Coast dives and the opium dens of Chinatown.
First person accounts of the major catastrophies of 19th century California.
Grafton Tyler Brown—whose heritage was likely one-eighth African American—finessed his way through San Francisco society by passing for white. Working in an environment hostile to African American achievement, Brown became a successful commercial artist and businessman in the rough-and-tumble gold rush era and the years after the Civil War. Best known for his bird’s-eye cityscapes, he also produced and published maps, charts, and business documents, and he illustrated books, sheet music, advertisements, and labels for cans and other packaging. This biography by a distinguished California historian gives an underappreciated artist and his work recognition long overdue. Focusing on Graft...
We grow up--so simple, it just seems to happen--and yet there are endless variations in the way we do it. What part does culture play in the process? How much do politics and economics have to do with it? As the nation has matured, have the ways people grow up changed too? This book traces the many paths to adulthood that Americans have pursued over time. Spanning more than two centuries of intense transformation in the lives of individuals and the life of a nation, Conflicting Paths is an innovative history of growing up in America. Harvey J. Graff, a distinguished social historian, mines more than five hundred personal narratives for what they can tell us about the passage from childhood t...
The sparkling wines of California rival the best French Champagnes today, but their place at our tables came about through careful craftsmanship that began more than a century ago. The predecessor of today’s California bubbly was Eclipse Champagne, the first commercially successful California sparkling wine, produced by Arpad Haraszthy in the mid- to late nineteenth century. In A Toast to Eclipse, Brian McGinty offers a definitive history of the wine, exploring California’s winemaking past and two of the people who put the state’s varietal wines on the map: Arpad and his father Agoston Haraszthy, the legendary “father of California viticulture.” Inspired by his father’s dream of ...
In Material Dreams, Starr turns to one of the most vibrant decades in the Golden State's history, the 1920s, when some two million Americans migrated to California, the vast majority settling in or around Los Angeles. Although he treats readers to intriguing side trips to Santa Barbara and Pasadena, Starr focuses here mainly on Los Angeles, revealing how this major city arose almost defiantly on a site lacking many of the advantages required for urban development, creating itself out of sheer will, the Great Gatsby of American cities. He describes how William Ellsworth Smyth, the Peter the Hermit of the Irrigation Crusade, propounded the importance of water in Southern California's future, a...