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Baja California Adventures
The stories featured in Baja California Adventures take place during a span of almost sixty years of travel in the rugged, parched, yet hauntingly attractive peninsula. The author kept detailed notes on most of his trips then fleshed out this skeleton in a narrative that places the reader in the role of participant in the adventure. Thus, one feels the bite of the 4WD tires into the desert sand, newly hard-packed by the moisture of a quick-moving thunderstorm. The author describes the excitement of finding Indian petroglyphs, arrowheads, or clay ollas in remote canyons. Because Mr. Tiscareo is also a pilot, many of the trips included here involve mention of the special immigration rules for ...
Flexible Domiciles
Although the author and his wife have been anchored to their last address for the past seventeen years, the theme of this book is to not sink roots. It starts with a day-to-day narrative of travel in Europe while the author enjoyed the thrills and challenges of a year's sabbatical. After a tour of England and Scotland, he explores the continent: France, the BDR (West Germany), the DDR (E. Germany), Czechoslovakia (current Czech Republic), and Poland before settling in for the winter in the town of Rastatt (located in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, not far from the E. bank of the Rhine River). Resuming travel in the spring, he explores Spain and undertakes a brief foray into the Nort...
Lands of Promise and Despair
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.
Californio Portraits
First published in 1981, Harry W. Crosby’s Last of the Californios captured the history of the mountain people of Baja California during a critical moment of transition, when the 1974 completion of the transpeninsular highway increased the Californios’ contact with the outside world and profoundly affected their traditional way of life. This updated and expanded version of that now-classic work incorporates the fruits of further investigation into the Californios’ lives and history, by Crosby and others. The result is the most thorough and extensive account of the people of Baja California from the time of the peninsula’s occupation by the Spaniards in the seventeenth century to the ...
Gathering the Desert
Looks at the history and uses of plants of the Sonoran Desert, including creosote, palm trees, mesquite, organpipe cactus, amaranth, chiles, and Devil's claw
Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo
Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (1807–90) grew up in Spanish California, became a leading military and political figure in Mexican California, and participated in some of the founding events of U.S. California. In 1874–75, Vallejo, working with historian and publisher Hubert Howe Bancroft, composed a five-volume history of Alta California—a monumental work that would be the most complete eyewitness account of California before the gold rush. But Bancroft shelved the work, and it has lain in the archives until its recent publication as Recuerdos: Historical and Personal Remembrances Relating to Alta California, 1769–1849, translated and edited by Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz. In...
The History of Alta California
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...
The Nature of Desert Nature
In this refreshing collection, one of our best writers on desert places, Gary Paul Nabhan, challenges traditional notions of the desert. Beautiful, reflective, and at times humorous, Nabhan’s extended essay also called “The Nature of Desert Nature” reveals the complexity of what a desert is and can be. He passionately writes about what it is like to visit a desert and what living in a desert looks like when viewed through a new frame, turning age-old notions of the desert on their heads. Nabhan invites a prism of voices—friends, colleagues, and advisors from his more than four decades of study of deserts—to bring their own perspectives. Scientists, artists, desert contemplatives, p...
Chuckwalla Land
“Wallace weaves science and mythology into a clear and entertaining story about the origin of California's deserts that invites the reader into a world of ancient mystery and modern revelation. This book will appeal to anyone who cherishes arid lands and their natural history.”-Bruce M. Pavlik, author of The California Deserts: An Ecological Rediscovery “David Rains Wallace explores the origins of the California desert with the endless curiosity of a naturalist, with the wit and wordplay of a fine essayist, and with the attention to detail of a lifelong scholar. He burrows toward the solution of the desert’s riddle by following two centuries of science; in doing so, Wallace writes a ...
The Buried Mirror
An exploration of Spanish culture in Spain and the Americas traces the social, political, and economic forces that created that culture.
