Title: Rainbow's end: Irish-Americans and the dilemmas of urban machine politics, 1840-1985
Author: Erie, Steven P
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Politics | Sociology | Urban Studies | Ethnic Studies | United  States  History
Publisher's Description: Unprecedented in its scope, Rainbow's End provides a bold new analysis of the emergence, growth, and decline of six classic Irish-American political machines in New York, Jersey City, Chicago, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Albany. Combining the approaches of political economy and historical sociology, Erie examines a wide range of issues, including the relationship between city and state politics, the manner in which machines shaped ethnic and working-class politics, and the reasons why centralized party organizations failed to emerge in Boston and Philadelphia despite their large Irish populations. The book ends with a thorough discussion of the significance of machine politics for today's urban minorities.   [brief]
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Title: American literary realism and the failed promise of contract 
Author: Thomas, Brook
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | American Literature | American Studies | Law | United  States  History
Publisher's Description: In law, the late nineteenth century is often called the Age of Contract; in literature, the Age of Realism. Brook Thomas's new book brings contract and realism together to offer groundbreaking insights into both while exploring the social and cultural crises that accompanied America's transition from industrial capitalism to the corporate capitalism of the twentieth century.Thomas argues that, radically conceived, contract promised to generate an equitable social order - one organized around interpersonal exchange rather than conformity to a transcendental standard. But as the idea of contract took center stage in American culture after the Civil War, the law failed to deliver on this promise, instead legitimating hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Moving expertly from legal analysis to social history, to profoundly recontextualized literary critique, Thomas shows how writers like Twain, James, Howells, and Chopin took up contract as a model, formally and thematically, evoking its possibilities and dramatizing its failures.Thomas investigates a host of issues at the forefront of public debate in the nineteenth century: race and the meaning of equality, miscegenation, marriage, labor unrest, economic transformation, and changes in notions of human agency and subjectivity. Cross-examining a wide range of key literary and legal texts, he rethinks the ways they relate to each other and to their social milieu.As recent political rhetoric demonstrates, the promise of contract is still very much alive. American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract challenges conventional critical wisdom and makes a broad, provocative, and nuanced contribution to legal and literary studies, as well as to intellectual and social history. It promises to revise and enrich our understanding of American culture, law, and letters.   [brief]
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Title: Between craft and class: skilled workers and factory politics in the United States and Britain, 1890-1922 
Author: Haydu, Jeffrey
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Sociology | United  States  History | European History | Labor Studies | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: Between Craft and Class provides an incisive new look at workers' responses to the momentous economic changes surrounding them in the early years of the twentieth century. In this work, Haydu focuses on the reaction of skilled metal workers to new production methods that threatened time-honored craft traditions. He finds that the workers' responses to industrial change varied - some defended the status quo, while others agreed to trade customary rules for economic rewards. Under some conditions class protest arose, as workers of diverse skills and trades joined to demand a greater voice in the management of industry. Between Craft and Class explores how broadly based movements for workers' control developed during this critical period, and why they ultimately failed.Comparing workers in the United States and Britain, Haydu's scholarship is distinguished by extensive primary source research and provocative theoretical insights. In its scope and depth, this book will revise current notions of craft politics and working-class radicalism during this period.   [brief]
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Title: Empire and revolution: the Americans in Mexico since the Civil War
Author: Hart, John M. (John Mason) 1935-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | Latin American History | United  States  History | American Studies | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: The deep relationship between the United States and Mexico has had repercussions felt around the world. This sweeping and unprecedented chronicle of the economic and social connections between the two nations opens a new window onto history from the Civil War to today and brilliantly illuminates the course of events that made the United States a global empire. The Mexican Revolution, Manifest Destiny, World War II, and NAFTA are all part of the story, but John Mason Hart's narrative transcends these moments of economic and political drama, resonating with the themes of wealth and power. Combining economic and historical analysis with personal memoirs and vivid descriptions of key episodes and players, Empire and Revolution is based on substantial amounts of previously unexplored source material. Hart excavated recently declassified documents in the archives of the United States government and traveled extensively in rural Mexico to uncover the rich sources for this gripping story of 135 years of intervention, cooperation, and corruption. Beginning just after the American Civil War, Hart traces the activities of an elite group of financiers and industrialists who, sensing opportunities for wealth to the south, began to develop Mexico's infrastructure. He charts their activities through the pivotal regime of Porfirio Díaz, when Americans began to gain ownership of Mexico's natural resources, and through the Mexican Revolution, when Americans lost many of their holdings in Mexico. Hart concentrates less on traditional political history in the twentieth century and more on the hidden interactions between Americans and Mexicans, especially the unfolding story of industrial production in Mexico for export to the United States. Throughout, this masterful narrative illuminates the development and expansion of the American railroad, oil, mining, and banking industries. Hart also shows how the export of the "American Dream" has shaped such areas as religion and work attitudes in Mexico. Empire and Revolution reveals much about the American psyche, especially the compulsion of American elites toward wealth, global power, and contact with other peoples, often in order to "save" them. These characteristics were first expressed internationally in Mexico, and Hart shows that the Mexican experience was and continues to be a prototype for U.S. expansion around the world. His work demonstrates the often inconspicuous yet profoundly damaging impact of American investment in the underdeveloped countries of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Empire and Revolution will be the definitive book on U.S.-Mexico relations and their local and global ramifications.   [brief]
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Title: What is this thing called jazz?: African American musicians as artists, critics, and activists
Author: Porter, Eric (Eric C.)
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Music | History | United  States  History | American Studies | African American Studies | American Music | Contemporary Music | Jazz
Publisher's Description: Despite the plethora of writing about jazz, little attention has been paid to what musicians themselves wrote and said about their practice. An implicit division of labor has emerged where, for the most part, black artists invent and play music while white writers provide the commentary. Eric Porter overturns this tendency in his creative intellectual history of African American musicians. He foregrounds the often-ignored ideas of these artists, analyzing them in the context of meanings circulating around jazz, as well as in relationship to broader currents in African American thought. Porter examines several crucial moments in the history of jazz: the formative years of the 1920s and 1930s; the emergence of bebop; the political and experimental projects of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s; and the debates surrounding Jazz at Lincoln Center under the direction of Wynton Marsalis. Louis Armstrong, Anthony Braxton, Marion Brown, Duke Ellington, W.C. Handy, Yusef Lateef, Abbey Lincoln, Charles Mingus, Archie Shepp, Wadada Leo Smith, Mary Lou Williams, and Reggie Workman also feature prominently in this book. The wealth of information Porter uncovers shows how these musicians have expressed themselves in print; actively shaped the institutional structures through which the music is created, distributed, and consumed, and how they aligned themselves with other artists and activists, and how they were influenced by forces of class and gender. What Is This Thing Called Jazz? challenges interpretive orthodoxies by showing how much black jazz musicians have struggled against both the racism of the dominant culture and the prescriptive definitions of racial authenticity propagated by the music's supporters, both white and black.   [brief]
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Title: Roads to Rome: the antebellum Protestant encounter with Catholicism 
Author: Franchot, Jenny 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | American Literature | American Studies | United  States  History | Christianity
Publisher's Description: The mixture of hostility and fascination with which native-born Protestants viewed the "foreign" practices of the "immigrant" church is the focus of Jenny Franchot's cultural, literary, and religious history of Protestant attitudes toward Roman Catholicism in nineteenth-century America.Franchot analyzes the effects of religious attitudes on historical ideas about America's origins and destiny. She then focuses on the popular tales of convent incarceration, with their Protestant "maidens" and lecherous, tyrannical Church superiors. Religious captivity narratives, like those of Indian captivity, were part of the ethnically, theologically, and sexually charged discourse of Protestant nativism.Discussions of Stowe, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Lowell - writers who sympathized with "Romanism" and used its imaginative properties in their fiction - further demonstrate the profound influence of religious forces on American national character.   [brief]
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Title: October cities: the redevelopment of urban literature 
Author: Rotella, Carlo 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Literature | American Studies | Urban Studies | United  States  History | American Literature | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Returning to his native Chicago after World War II, Nelson Algren found a city transformed. The flourishing industry, culture, and literature that had placed prewar Chicago at center stage in American life were entering a time of crisis. The middle class and economic opportunity were leaving the inner city, and Black Southerners arriving in Chicago found themselves increasingly estranged from the nation's economic and cultural resources. For Algren, Chicago was becoming "an October sort of city even in the spring," and as Carlo Rotella demonstrates, this metaphorical landscape of fall led Algren and others to forge a literary form that traced the American city's transformation. Narratives of decline, like the complementary narratives of black migration and inner-city life written by Claude Brown and Gwendolyn Brooks, became building blocks of the postindustrial urban literature. October Cities examines these narratives as they played out in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Manhattan. Through the work of Algren, Brown, Brooks, and other urban writers, Rotella explores the relationship of this new literature to the cities it draws upon for inspiration. The stories told are of neighborhoods and families molded by dramatic urban transformation on a grand scale with vast movements of capital and people, racial succession, and an intensely changing urban landscape.   [brief]
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Title: As we are now: mixblood essays on race and identity
Author: Penn, W. S 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Ethnic Studies | Native American Studies | American Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Social Problems | United  States  History
Publisher's Description: The thirteen contributors to As We Are Now invite readers to explore with them the untamed territory of race and mixblood identity in North America. A "mixblood," according to editor W.S. Penn, recognizes that his or her identity comes not from distinct and separable strains of ancestry but from the sum of the tension and interplay of all his or her ancestral relationships. These first-person narratives cross racial, national, and disciplinary boundaries in a refreshingly experimental approach to writing culture. Their authors call on similar but varied cultural and aesthetic traditions - mostly oral - in order to address some aspect of race and identity about which they feel passionate, and all resist the essentialist point of view. Mixblood Native American, Mestizo/a, and African-American writers focus their discussion on the questions indigenous and minority people ask and the way in which they ask them, clearly merging the singular "I" with the communal "we." These are new voices in the dialogue of ethnic writers, and they offer a highly original treatment of an important subject.   [brief]
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Title: Race music: black cultures from bebop to hip-hop
Author: Ramsey, Guthrie P
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Music | American Music | American Studies | Popular Music | United  States  History | Ethnomusicology | African American Studies
Publisher's Description: This powerful book covers the vast and various terrain of African American music, from bebop to hip-hop. Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., begins with an absorbing account of his own musical experiences with family and friends on the South Side of Chicago, evoking Sunday-morning worship services, family gatherings with food and dancing, and jam sessions at local nightclubs. This lays the foundation for a brilliant discussion of how musical meaning emerges in the private and communal realms of lived experience and how African American music has shaped and reflected identities in the black community. Deeply informed by Ramsey's experience as an accomplished musician, a sophisticated cultural theorist, and an enthusiast brought up in the community he discusses, Race Music explores the global influence and popularity of African American music, its social relevance, and key questions regarding its interpretation and criticism. Beginning with jazz, rhythm and blues, and gospel, this book demonstrates that while each genre of music is distinct - possessing its own conventions, performance practices, and formal qualities - each is also grounded in similar techniques and conceptual frameworks identified with African American musical traditions. Ramsey provides vivid glimpses of the careers of Dinah Washington, Louis Jordan, Dizzy Gillespie, Cootie Williams, and Mahalia Jackson, among others, to show how the social changes of the 1940s elicited an Afro-modernism that inspired much of the music and culture that followed. Race Music illustrates how, by transcending the boundaries between genres, black communities bridged generational divides and passed down knowledge of musical forms and styles. It also considers how the discourse of soul music contributed to the vibrant social climate of the Black Power Era. Multilayered and masterfully written, Race Music provides a dynamic framework for rethinking the many facets of African American music and the ethnocentric energy that infused its creation.   [brief]
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Title: Reproducing empire: race, sex, science, and U.S. imperialism in Puerto Rico
Author: Briggs, Laura 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Ethnic Studies | Medicine | United  States  History | Women's Studies | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: Original and compelling, Laura Briggs's Reproducing Empire shows how, for both Puerto Ricans and North Americans, ideologies of sexuality, reproduction, and gender have shaped relations between the island and the mainland. From science to public policy, the "culture of poverty" to overpopulation, feminism to Puerto Rican nationalism, this book uncovers the persistence of concerns about motherhood, prostitution, and family in shaping the beliefs and practices of virtually every player in the twentieth-century drama of Puerto Rican colonialism. In this way, it sheds light on the legacies haunting contemporary debates over globalization. Puerto Rico is a perfect lens through which to examine colonialism and globalization because for the past century it has been where the United States has expressed and fine-tuned its attitudes toward its own expansionism. Puerto Rico's history holds no simple lessons for present-day debate over globalization but does unearth some of its history. Reproducing Empire suggests that interventionist discourses of rescue, family, and sexuality fueled U.S. imperial projects and organized American colonialism. Through the politics, biology, and medicine of eugenics, prostitution, and birth control, the United States has justified its presence in the territory's politics and society. Briggs makes an innovative contribution to Puerto Rican and U.S. history, effectively arguing that gender has been crucial to the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, and more broadly, to U.S. expansion elsewhere.   [brief]
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Title: Mind games: American culture and the birth of psychotherapy 
Author: Caplan, Eric 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | United  States  History | American Studies | Science | History and Philosophy of Science
Publisher's Description: Eric Caplan's fascinating exploration of Victorian culture in the United States shatters the myth of Freud's seminal role in the creation of American psychotherapy. Resurrecting the long-buried "prehistory" of American mental therapeutics, Mind Games tells the remarkable story of how a widely assorted group of actors - none of them hailing from Vienna or from any other European city - compelled a reluctant medical profession to accept a new role for the mind in medicine. By the time Freud first set foot on American soil in 1909, as Caplan demonstrates, psychotherapy was already integrally woven into the fabric of American culture and medicine.What came to be known as psychotherapy emerged in the face of considerable opposition, much - indeed most - of which was generated by the medical profession itself. Caplan examines the contentious interplay within the American medical community, as well as between American physicians and their lay rivals, who included faith-healers, mind-curists, Christian Scientists, and Protestant ministers. These early practitioners of alternative medicine ultimately laid the groundwork for a distinctive and much heralded American type of psychotherapy. Its grudging acceptance by both medical elites and rank and file physicians signified their understanding that reliance on physical therapies to treat nervous and mental symptoms compromised their capacity to treat - and compete - effectively in a rapidly expanding mental-medical marketplace. Mind Games shows how psychotherapy came to occupy its central position in mainstream American culture.   [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: 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: 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: Three Mile Island: a nuclear crisis in historical perspective
Author: Walker, J. Samuel
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: History | Technology and Instruments | Environment | Technology and Society | United  States  History
Publisher's Description: Twenty-five years ago, Hollywood released The China Syndrome, featuring Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas as a TVnews crew who witness what appears to be a serious accident at a nuclear power plant. In a spectacular coincidence, on March 28, 1979, less than two weeks after the movie came out, the worst accident in the history of commercial nuclear power in the United States occurred at Three Mile Island. For five days, the citizens of central Pennsylvania and the entire world, amid growing alarm, followed the efforts of authorities to prevent the crippled plant from spewing dangerous quantities of radiation into the environment. This book is the first comprehensive account of the causes, context, and consequences of the Three Mile Island crisis. In gripping prose, J. Samuel Walker captures the high human drama surrounding the accident, sets it in the context of the heated debate over nuclear power in the seventies, and analyzes the social, technical, and political issues it raised. His superb account of those frightening and confusing days will clear up misconceptions held to this day about Three Mile Island. The heart of Walker's suspenseful narrative is a moment-by-moment account of the accident itself, in which he brings to life the players who dealt with the emergency: the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the state of Pennsylvania, the White House, and a cast of scientists and reporters. He also looks at the aftermath of the accident on the surrounding area, including studies of its long-term health effects on the population, providing a fascinating window onto the politics of nuclear power and an authoritative account of a critical event in recent American history.   [brief]
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Title: Robert Maynard Hutchins: a memoir 
Author: Mayer, Milton Sanford 1908-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Literature | Autobiographies and Biographies | Print Media | Education | United  States  History
Publisher's Description: At age 28, he was dean of Yale Law School; at 30, president of the University of Chicago. By his mid-thirties, Robert Maynard Hutchins was an eminent figure in the world of educational innovation and liberal politics. And when he was 75, he told a friend, "I should have died at 35."Milton Mayer, Hutchins's colleague, and friend, gives an intimate picture of the remarkably outstanding, and fallible, man who participated in many of this century's most important social and political controversies. He captures the energy and intellectual fervor Hutchins could transmit to others, and which the man brought to the fields of law, politics, civil rights, and public affairs.Rich in detail and anecdote, this memoir vividly brings to life both a man and an age.   [brief]
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Title: Hollywood in Berlin: American cinema and Weimar Germany 
Author: Saunders, Thomas J
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | German Studies | Film | United  States  History | European History
Publisher's Description: The setting is 1920s Berlin, cultural heart of Europe and the era's only serious cinematic rival to Hollywood. In his engaging study, Thomas Saunders explores an outstanding example of one of the most important cultural developments of this century: global Americanization through the motion picture.The invasion of Germany by American films, which began in 1921 with overlapping waves of sensationalist serials, slapstick shorts, society pictures, and historical epics, initiated a decade of cultural collision and accommodation. On the one hand it fueled an impassioned debate about the properties of cinema and the specter of wholesale Americanization. On the other hand it spawned unprecedented levels of cooperation and exchange.In Berlin, American motion pictures not only entertained all social classes and film tastes but also served as a vehicle for American values and a source of sharp economic competition. Hollywood in Berlin correlates the changing forms of Hollywood's contributions to Weimar culture and the discourses that framed and interpreted them, restoring historical contours to a leading aspect of cultural interchange in this century. At the same time, the book successfully embeds Weimar cinema in its contemporary international setting.   [brief]
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Title: Domestic individualism: imagining self in nineteenth-century America
Author: Brown, Gillian
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | American Literature | Gender Studies | United  States  History | American Studies
Publisher's Description: Gillian Brown's book probes the key relationship between domestic ideology and formulations of the self in nineteenth-century America. Arguing that domesticity institutes gender, class, and racial distinctions that govern masculine as well as feminine identity, Brown brilliantly alters, for literary critics, feminists, and cultural historians, the critical perspective from which nineteenth-century American literature and culture have been viewed.In this study of the domestic constitution of individualism, Brown traces how the values of interiority, order, privacy, and enclosure associated with the American home come to define selfhood in general. By analyzing writings by Stowe, Hawthorne, Melville, Fern, and Gilman, and by examining other contemporary cultural modes - abolitionism, consumerism, architecture, interior decorating, motherhood, mesmerism, hysteria, and agoraphobia - she reconfigures the parameters of both domesticity and the patterns of self it fashions. Unfolding a representational history of the domestic, Brown's work offers striking new readings of the literary texts as well as of the cultural contexts that they embody.   [brief]
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Title: Indians in the making: ethnic relations and Indian identities around Puget Sound
Author: Harmon, Alexandra 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Native American Studies | United  States  History | Ethnic Studies | California and the West
Publisher's Description: In the Puget Sound region of Washington state, indigenous peoples and their descendants have a long history of interaction with settlers and their descendants. Indians in the Making offers the first comprehensive account of these interactions, from contact with traders of the 1820s to the Indian fishing rights activism of the 1970s. In this thoroughly researched history, Alexandra Harmon also provides a theoretically sophisticated analysis that charts shifting notions of Indian identity, both in native and in nonnative communities.During the period under consideration, each major shift in demographic, economic, and political conditions precipitated new deliberations about how to distinguish Indians from non-Indians and from each other. By chronicling such dialogues over 150 years, this groundbreaking study reveals that Indian identity has a complex history. Examining relations in various spheres of life - labor, public ceremony, marriage and kinship, politics and law - Harmon shows how Indians have continually redefined themselves. Her focus on the negotiations that have given rise to modern Indian identity makes a significant contribution to the discourse of contemporary multiculturalism and ethnic studies.   [brief]
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Title: Taming the elephant: politics, government, and law in pioneer California
Author: Burns, John F
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Californian and Western History | United  States  History | California and the West
Publisher's Description: Taming the Elephant is the last of four volumes in the distinguished California History Sesquicentennial Series, an outstanding compilation of original essays by leading historians and writers. These topical, interrelated volumes reexamine the meaning of the founding of modern California during the state's pioneer period. General themes run through all four volumes: the interplay of traditional cultures and frontier innovation in the creation of a distinctive California society; the dynamic interaction of people and nature and the beginnings of massive environmental change; the impact of the California experience on the nation and the world; the influence of pioneer patterns on modern California; and the legacy of ethnic and cultural diversity as a major influence on the state's history. This fourth volume treats the role of post-Gold Rush California government, politics, and law in the building of a dynamic state, with influences that persist today. Provocative essays investigate the creation of constitutional foundations, law and jurisprudence, the formation of government agencies, and the development of public policy. Authors chart the roles played by diverse groups - criminals and peace officers, entrepreneurs and miners, farmers and public officials, defenders of discrimination and female and African American activists. The essays also explore subjects largely overlooked in the past, such as the significance of local and federal government in pioneer California and early struggles to secure civil rights for women and racial minorities.   [brief]
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