Title: Bottled poetry: Napa winemaking from Prohibition to the modern era 
Author: Lapsley, James T
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | California  and  the  West | United States History | Californian and Western History | Viticulture | Wine
Publisher's Description: California's Napa Valley is one of the world's premier wine regions today, but this has not always been true. James Lapsley's entertaining history explains how a collective vision of excellence among winemakers and a keen sense of promotion transformed the region and its wines following the repeal of Prohibition. Focusing primarily on the formative years of Napa's fine winemaking, 1934 to 1967, Lapsley then concludes with a chapter on the wine boom of the 1970s, placing it in a social context and explaining the role of Napa vineyards in the beverage's growing popularity.Names familiar to wine drinkers occur throughout these pages - Beaulieu, Beringer, Charles Krug, Christian Brothers, Louis Martini, Inglenook - and the colorful stories behind the names give this book a personal dimension. These strong-willed, competitive winemakers found ways to work cooperatively, both in sharing knowledge and technology and in promoting their region. The result was an unprecedented improvement in wine quality that brought with it a new reputation for the Napa Valley.In The Silverado Squatters , Robert Louis Stevenson refers to wine as "bottled poetry," and although Stevenson's reference was to the elite vineyards of France, his words are appropriate for Napa wines today. Their success, as Lapsley makes clear, is due to much more than the beneficence of sun and soil. Craft, vision, and determination have played a part too, and for that, wine drinkers the world over are grateful.   [brief]
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Title: California riparian systems: ecology, conservation, and productive management 
Author: Warner, Richard E
Published: University of California Press,  1984
Subjects: Environmental Studies | California  and  the  West
Publisher's Description: This volume presents 135 of the papers presented at the 1981 California Riparian Systems Conference. The papers address all aspects of riparian systems: habitat, wildlife, land management, land use policy planning, conservation and water resource management.
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Title: California's salmon and steelhead: the struggle to restore an imperiled resource 
Author: Lufkin, Alan
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Environmental Studies | Ecology | California  and  the  West | Marine and Freshwater Sciences
Publisher's Description: Millions upon millions of salmon and steelhead once filled California streams, providing a plentiful and sustainable food resource for the original peoples of the region. But over the years, dams and irrigation diversions have reduced natural spawning habitat from an estimated 6,000 miles to fewer than 300. River pollution has also hit hard at fish populations, which within recent decades have diminished by 80 percent. One species, the San Joaquin River spring chinook, became extinct soon after World War II. Other species are nearly extinct.This volume documents the reasons for the decline; it also offers practical suggestions about how the decline might be reversed. The California salmon story is presented here in human perspective: its broad historical, economic, cultural, and political facets, as well as the biological, are all treated. No comparable work has ever been published, although some of the material has been available for half a century.In the richly varied contributions in this volume, the reader meets Indians whose history is tied to the history of the salmon and steelhead upon which they depend; commercial trollers who see their livelihood and unique lifestyle vanishing; biologists and fishery managers alarmed at the loss of river water habitable by fish and at the effects of hatcheries on native gene pools. Women who fish, conservation-minded citizens, foresters, economists, outdoor writers, engineers, politicians, city youth restoring streambeds - all are represented. Their lives - and the lives of all Californians - are affected in myriad ways by the fate of California's salmon and steelhead.   [brief]
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Title: California's spiritual frontiers: religious alternatives in Anglo-Protestantism, 1850-1910 
Author: Frankiel, Sandra Sizer 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: History | Californian and Western History | California  and  the  West | Christianity
Publisher's Description: In this fascinating work, Frankiel examines California's rich, multi-faceted religious history during the period in which the state was taking shape on the American landscape.
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Title: The color bind: California's battle to end affirmative action 
Author: Chavez, Lydia 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Politics | American Studies | Public Policy | California  and  the  West
Publisher's Description: The Color Bind tells the story of how Glynn Custred and Thomas Wood, two unknown academics, decided to write Proposition 209 in 1992 and thereby set in motion a series of events, far beyond their control, destined to transform the legal, political, and everyday meaning of civil rights for the next generation. Going behind the mass media coverage of the initiative, Lydia Chávez narrates the complex underlying motivations and maneuvering of the people, organizations, and political parties involved in the campaign to end affirmative action in California.For the first time, the role of University of California regent Ward Connerly in the campaign - one largely assigned to public relations - is put into perspective. In the course of the book Chávez also provides a rare behind-the-scenes journalistic account of the complex and fascinating workings of the initiative process. Chávez recreates the post-election climate of 1994, when the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI) appeared to be the right-time, right-place vehicle for Governor Pete Wilson and other Republican presidential prospects. President Clinton and the state Democratic Party thought the CCRI would splinter the party and jeopardize the upcoming presidential election. The Republicans, who saw the CCRI as a "wedge issue" to use against the Democrats, found to their surprise that the initiative was much more divisive in their own party.Updating her text to include the most current material, Chávez deftly delineates the interplay of competing interests around the CCRI, and explains why the opposition was unsuccessful in its strategy to fight the initiative. Her analysis probes the momentous - and national - implications of this state initiative in shaping the future of affirmative action in this country.   [brief]
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Title: Garrett Eckbo: modern landscapes for living 
Author: Treib, Marc
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Architecture | Art History | California  and  the  West
Publisher's Description: One of the central figures in modern landscape architecture, Garrett Eckbo (1910-2000) was a major influence in the field during an active career spanning five decades. While most of the early American designers concentrated on the private garden and the corporate landscape, Eckbo's work demonstrated innovative design ideas in a social setting. This engagement with social improvement has stayed with Eckbo throughout his life, distinguishing both his intentions and achievements, from his early work for the Farm Security Administration to his partnerships (including one of the most prominent landscape firms in the world, Eckbo, Dean, Austin, and Williams - EDAW) and his years as chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.In an elegant and detailed book that includes more than 100 of Eckbo's designs, Marc Treib examines the aesthetic formation of Eckbo's manner, and by implication the broader field of landscape architecture since the 1930s. Dorothée Imbert writes about Eckbo's social vision, including his belief that ultimately, landscape design is the "arrangement of environments for people ." The book also contains a biographical and professional chronology and a complete bibliography of publications by and about Garrett Eckbo.   [brief]
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Title: Global climate change and California: potential impacts and responses 
Author: Knox, Joseph B
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Environmental Studies | Ecology | California  and  the  West
Publisher's Description: California's extraordinary ecological and economic diversity has brought it prosperity, pollution, and overpopulation. These factors and the state's national and international ties make California an essential test case for the impact of global climate change - temperature increases, water shortages, more ultraviolet radiation. The scientists in this forward-looking volume give their best estimates of what the future holds.Beginning with an overview by Joseph Knox, the book discusses the greenhouse effect, the latest climate modeling capabilities, the implications of climate change for water resources, agriculture, biological ecosystems, human behavior, and energy.The warning inherent in a scenario of unchecked population growth and energy use in California applies to residents of the entire planet. The sobering conclusions related here include recommendations for research that will help us all prepare for potential climate change.   [brief]
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Title: A golden state: mining and economic development in gold rush California 
Author: Rawls, James J
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: California  and  the  West | American Studies | Natural History | Geography | Californian and Western History | United States History
Publisher's Description: California's storied Gold Rush triggered momentous changes not only for the state, but also for the nation and the world. The economic impact of that epoch-making event is the focus of the second volume of the California History Sesquicentennial Series. The chapter contributors offer a range of perspectives, including commentaries that reflect the new scholarship of environmental and resource history. Together, the essays and more than 90 illustrations show how the Gold Rush precipitated a veritable economic revolution whose effects continue to this day.Among the topics given a fresh interpretation are the relationship between technology and society; the environmental impact from mining and the sudden increase in California's population; the influence of the Gold Rush on agriculture, manufacturing, banking, and transportation; and its impact on the peoples and economies of Latin America, Europe, and Asia. The popular image of the independent prospector is also examined anew, as is the role of different groups of industrial workers, including Chinese, Mexicans, and women.The Gold Rush was a multiplier, an event that accelerated a chain of interrelated consequences that in turn accelerated economic growth. But it also touched a deep-seated nerve in the human psyche and unleashed economic forces, for good or ill, that transformed California forever into a Golden State.   [brief]
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Title: In our own hands: a strategy for conserving California's biological diversity 
Author: Jensen, Deborah B
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Environmental Studies | Ecology | Public Policy | California  and  the  West
Publisher's Description: "Biodiversity." As argument over environmental and conservation policy grows more heated in California and throughout the nation, the term has become a buzzword. But what does biodiversity really mean? What really threatens it? Why should we care? In Our Own Hands offers a readable, scientifically sound view of California's biological diversity and what must be done to preserve it. The book will be an invaluable resource for environmental and natural resource specialists, educators, and general readers.Local and global forces threaten California's wetlands, dunes, oak woodlands, and riparian forest habitats - all declining habitats in a rapidly urbanizing, culturally heterogeneous, and politically turbulent state. Always a bellwether, California will be a model for the rest of the United States in its scientific and political solutions to conservation problems. This book proposes the first steps toward a unified national conservation policy for the twenty-first century.   [brief]
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Title: In the shadow of the eagles: Sonora and the transformation of the border during the Porfiriato 
Author: Tinker Salas, Miguel
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | United States History | Latin American Studies | Ethnic Studies | California  and  the  West
Publisher's Description: In the Shadow of the Eagles considers the historical roots of Mexican border society. The Mexican northwest, and Sonora in particular, has often captured the public's imagination; it has been portrayed as a region of untold mineral wealth, insurgent Apaches and Yaquis, self-reliant cowboys, miners, and smugglers. During the nineteenth century, however, the Sonoran region was transformed from a distant frontier outpost to a bustling and influential border state. This transformation gave rise to a dynamic relationship between Sonora and the southwestern United States. In this innovative synthesis of Mexican, border, and western history, Miguel Tinker Salas traces the social and economic history of the Sonora border region and shows the role played by the United States in the economy of Mexico.Drawing on extensive research in Mexico City, Sonora, Arizona, and California, Tinker Salas contributes original discussions of the development of regional credit practices, the elite's use of violence as a political tool to preserve autonomy, the effects of class, race, and gender in Sonoran society, and the influence of the railroad and mining on the border economy. Balancing theory with original empirical data in a strong, readable narrative, In the Shadow of the Eagles recasts our understanding of regional Mexican history and expands our ideas about the borderlands.   [brief]
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Title: Natural history of the White-Inyo Range, eastern California 
Author: Hall, Clarence A
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Environmental Studies | Ecology | Earth Sciences | California  and  the  West | Natural History
Publisher's Description: The White-Inyo Range - rising sharply from the eastern edge of Owens Valley - is one of the most extraordinary landscapes in the world. High, dry, and amazingly diverse, it boasts an expansive alpine tundra and features the oldest living species on earth - the 4,000-year-old Bristlecone Pines. This colorful and authoritative volume assembles a wealth of information of deep interest to the hikers and scientists attracted to White-Inyo's altitude and isolation.The nearly two dozen contributors to the volume are leading experts on the flora and fauna, the geology, geomorphology, meteorology, anthropology, and archaeology of the area. The book offers descriptions of more than 650 kinds of living organisms, from the handful of fish to the abundance of reptile, amphibian, bird and plant species. (It provides descriptions of hundreds of flowering plants.) It contains an 8-color geologic map and a roadside guide that enables the visitor to make sense of the area's complex geological history. Readers will also learn about air currents that make the range a delight for sailplane pilots and create strange cloud formations. And a special chapter tells what is known of the Native Americans who moved up and down the mountain slopes in response to seasonal changes.For anyone who wishes to visit this astonishing area or to do research there, this volume will be a unique, comprehensive resource.   [brief]
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Title: Observations in Lower California 
Author: Baegert, Jacob 1717-1772
Published: University of California Press,  1979
Subjects: History | United States History | California  and  the  West | Californian and Western History
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Title: On the edge of America: California modernist art, 1900-1950 
Author: Karlstrom, Paul J
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Art | Art History | California  and  the  West | United States History | Californian and Western History
Publisher's Description: To many, California's social and cultural identity has set it apart from the rest of the nation. Identified almost exclusively with Hollywood and popular culture, the entire region has been denied a meaningful relationship to mainstream twentieth-century modernism. This groundbreaking collection emphatically challenges that assumption. In essays about California art during the first half of the century, the contributors evoke a culture, now recognizable as modernist, that reflects the actual circumstances of contemporary West Coast artistic experience in all its richness. The subjects include painting, murals, sculpture, film, photography, and architecture.The issue of regionalism is central to this remarkable collection. How do we build a cultural portrait of an area that reveals its distinctive character while recognizing its participation in the larger art historical framework? Through the essays runs the theme of an alternative culture that transformed modernism to suit its own regional imperatives. Compelled by a sense of distance and the need for reinvention, California artists created traditions for a new cultural landscape and society. On the Edge of America is an enlightening and visually exciting addition to the growing literature on California art and culture. Through its fresh and expanded view of modernism, it is also well suited to the formulation of a truly national cultural narrative, one that embraces the edges as well as the center of American creative life.   [brief]
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Title: One step from the White House: the rise and fall of Senator William F. Knowland 
Author: Montgomery, Gayle B 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Politics | Autobiographies and Biographies | California  and  the  West | Californian and Western History | American Studies | United States History
Publisher's Description: During the Cold War years of the 1950s, William F. Knowland was one of the most important figures in American politics. As the Republican leader of the U.S. Senate, the wealthy California newspaper heir was recognized and respected by millions. His influence with President Eisenhower led to Earl Warren's appointment as chief justice, and Knowland set in motion a U.S.-China policy that remains part of our international direction today. Yet he committed suicide in 1974, following a personal decline that included political humiliation, a ruined marriage, and the loss of his family fortune.This is the first full-scale biography of Bill Knowland, written by two journalists who came to know him after he left Washington in 1958. Gayle B. Montgomery was a political editor at the Oakland Tribune , the newspaper owned by Knowland's father, the power-wielding Joseph R. Knowland. James W. Johnson was a Tribune editorial writer. Both men worked with Knowland when he returned to the newspaper after giving up his Senate seat in a failed bid to become governor of California. Knowland lost the governorship race to Edmund G. (Pat) Brown; had he won, many observers felt Knowland would have had a clear shot at the White House.This is a book not only about Mr. Republican, but also one that illuminates the strengths and deficiencies of Republican party politics during the years when the party was at its zenith. In portraying the life of Bill Knowland, the authors cast a glaring light both on the machinations of political power and on the Republican establishment's aspirations in the Warren-Eisenhower era.   [brief]
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Title: Over the edge: remapping the American West 
Author: Matsumoto, Valerie J
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: American Studies | California  and  the  West | Popular Culture | History | United States History | Californian and Western History | German Studies
Publisher's Description: From the Gold Rush to rush hour, the history of the American West is fraught with diverse, subversive, and at times downright eccentric elements. This provocative volume challenges traditional readings of western history and literature, and redraws the boundaries of the American West with absorbing essays ranging widely on topics from tourism to immigration, from environmental battles to interethnic relations, and from law to film. Taken together, the essays reassess the contributions of a diverse and multicultural America to the West, as they link western issues to global frontiers.Featuring the latest work by some of the best new writers both inside and outside academia, the original essays in Over the Edge confront the traditional field of western American studies with a series of radical, speculative, and sometimes outrageous challenges. The collection reads the West through Ben-Hur and the films of Mae West; revises the western American literary canon to include the works of African American and Mexican American writers; examines the implications of miscegenation law and American Indian blood quantum requirements; and brings attention to the historical participation of Mexican and Japanese American women, Native American slaves, and Alaskan cannery workers in community life.   [brief]
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Title: Pioneer urbanites: a social and cultural history of Black San Francisco 
Author: Daniels, Douglas Henry
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: American Studies | African American Studies | Social Problems | California  and  the  West | United States History
Publisher's Description: The black migration to San Francisco and the Bay Area differed from the mass movement of Southern rural blacks and their families into the eastern industrial cities. Those who traveled West, or arrived by ship, were often independent, sophisticated, single men. Many were associated with the transportation boom following the Gold Rush; others traveled as employees of wealthy individuals.Douglas Daniels argues for the importance of going beyond the written record and urban statistics in examining the life of a minority community. He has studied photographs from family albums and interviewed members of old black San Francisco families in his effort to provide the first nuanced picture of the lives of black San Franciscans from the 1860s to the 1940s.   [brief]
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Title: Ritual ground: Bent's Old Fort, world formation, and the annexation of the Southwest 
Author: Comer, Douglas C
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Californian and Western History | Cultural Anthropology | California  and  the  West | United States History
Publisher's Description: From about 1830 to 1849, Bent's Old Fort, located in present-day Colorado on the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail, was the largest trading post in the Southwest and the mountain-plains region. Although the raw enterprise and improvisation that characterized the American westward movement seem to have little to do with ritual, Douglas Comer argues that the fort grew and prospered because of ritual and that ritual shaped the subsequent history of the region to an astonishing extent.At Bent's Old Fort, rituals of trade, feasting, gaming, marriage, secret societies, and war, as well as the "calcified ritual" provided by the fort itself, brought together and restructured Anglo, Hispanic, and American Indian cultures. Comer sheds new light on this heretofore poorly understood period in American history, building at the same time a powerfully convincing case to demonstrate that the human world is made through ritual.Comer gives his narrative an anthropological and philosophical framework; the events at Bent's Old Fort provide a compelling example not only of "world formation" but of a world's tragic collapse, culminating in the Sand Creek massacre. He also calls attention to the reconstructed Bent's Old Fort on the site of the original. Here visitors reenact history, staff work out personal identities, and groups lobby for special versions of history by ritual recasting of the past as the present.   [brief]
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Title: Rugged justice: the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the American West, 1891-1941 
Author: Frederick, David C
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | History | United States History | Californian and Western History | California  and  the  West | Law
Publisher's Description: Few chapters in American judicial history have enjoyed as colorful a past as has the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Created in 1891, its jurisdiction now encompasses California, Oregon, Nevada, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Arizona, Hawaii, and Alaska. David Frederick has mined archival sources, including court records and legal papers throughout the West and in Washington, D.C., to document the Ninth Circuit's first fifty years. His findings are much more than a record of the court, however, for they also provide a unique social and cultural history of the West.During these years, the court heard key cases involving railroads, the Alaska gold rush, Chinese immigration, organized labor, and use of natural resources. Many of the decisions from this period foreshadowed issues that are with us today. Frederick also documents the court's part in Western development and in issues relating to World War I, Prohibition, New Deal legislation, and the evolving role of federal judges.Frederick portrays the West's most important judicial institution with clarity and intelligence, reminding us that the evolution of the Ninth Circuit both reflected and affected the dramatic changes occurring in the West during the court's early years. This is a book that will appeal not only to lawyers, but to historians, sociologists, and general readers as well.   [brief]
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Title: Sea cliffs, beaches, and coastal valleys of San Diego County: some amazing histories and some horrifying implications 
Author: Kuhn, Gerald G
Published: University of California Press,  1984
Subjects: Geography | California  and  the  West | Marine and Freshwater Sciences | Geology | Ecology
Publisher's Description: California's coastal zones are areas of extreme vulnerability, subject to the vicissitudes of weather and prone to erosion, landslides, and flooding. Gerald Kuhn and Francis Shepard examine and analyze these threats to coastal stability in a thought-provoking and detailed study of the coastal area of San Diego County from the nineteenth century to the present. An invaluable resource for oceanographers, geologists, meteorologists, coastal engineers, property owners, developers, and planning and regulatory agencies.   [brief]
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Title: Storm over Mono: the Mono Lake battle and the California water future 
Author: Hart, John 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Environmental Studies | Environmental Studies | Natural History | California  and  the  West
Publisher's Description: A dramatic environmental saga unfolds in John Hart's compelling story of the fight to save Mono Lake. This ancient inland sea, in the eastern Sierra near Yosemite National Park, is among the oldest in North America. But over the past fifty years, as its feeder streams were steadily drained to supply water to ever-growing, ever-thirsty Los Angeles, the lake's water volume eventually was reduced by half. Mono Lake's bizarre but productive ecosystem began to collapse: salinity greatly increased, nesting and migrating birds were threatened, and fierce alkali dust storms became a common occurrence.Then, in the mid-1970s, a handful of people, most of them students with minimal financial resources, began a campaign to save the dying lake. They took on not only Los Angeles but the entire state government and a whole way of thinking about water. Their fight seemed doomed in the beginning, but long years of grassroots education and effort finally paid off. In 1994, the California Water Resources Control Board ruled that Los Angeles's use of Mono Lake's waters be restricted. Over time, the lake will return to a healthy condition.John Hart integrates natural, social, and political history into a story that is a source of hope for anyone concerned about the environment. Storm over Mono demonstrates the important role of science in public policy debates and validates the concept of the public trust, the idea that certain things belong to us all, not metaphorically but in simple legal fact.Complementing Hart's narrative are 32 stunning color photographs by a dozen leading nature photographers, along with numerous black-and-white photographs, illustrations, and maps.   [brief]
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