Along the California coastline lies the community of San Luis Obispo; a town just as rich in history as it is in beauty. Situated almost directly between Los Angeles and San Francisco, San Luis Obispo was first inhabited by the Chumash and Salinan Indians in 1400 B.C. It took almost 3,000 years before its majestic landscape was encountered byEuropean explorers.

This comprehensive narrative history of the California Gold Rush describes daily life during this historic period, documenting its wide-reaching effects and examining the significant individuals and organizations of the time.It is easy to see the vestiges of the California Gold Rush in the state's modern culture. The San Francisco 49ers football team are named after the term given to those who flocked to California in 1849 in search of gold; California is nicknamed...

NEW YORK TIMES • 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2021New York Times • Times Critics Top Books of 2021New York Times BestsellerBest Books of the Year • Washington Post, TIME, NPR, Oprah Daily, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Kansas City Independent, Los Angeles Public Library, Washington Independent Review of Books, Spy, Audile, Biblioracle, AbeBooksThe essential, sweeping...

**Winner of the American Book AwardPEN Literary Award FinalistThese essays blending memoir, history, and landscape “will create seismic shifts in readers’ perspectives on race, gender, and nature” as they explore how America’s ideas of ‘race’ have marked its people and the land (BuzzFeed).**Sand and stone are Earth’s fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life–defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl ...

Was Roger Williams too pure for the Puritans, and what does that have to do with Rhode Island? Why did Augustine Herman take ten years to complete the map that established Delaware? How did Rocky Mountain rogues help create the state of Colorado? All this and more is explained in Mark Stein's new book.How the States Got Their Shapes Too follows How the States Got Their Shapes looks at American history through the lens of its borders, but, while How The States Got Their Shapes told ...

**A sweeping and overdue retelling of U.S. history that recognizes that Native Americans are essential to understanding the evolution of modern America“In accounts of American history, Indigenous peoples are often treated as largely incidental—either obstacles to be overcome or part of a narrative separate from the arc of nation-building. Blackhawk . . . [shows] that Native communities have, instead, been inseparable from the American story all along.”—Washington Post Book Worl...

This short essay argues that "big government" begins in America's earliest days-- despite our founding myth of small government and limited federal activity. The essay addresses the federal government's indispensable role in land acquisition, its regulation of the fur trade, and its role in managing defense, trade, and social policies. Complementing a wave of new scholarship, "How Big Government Won the West" offers a brief and compelling look at governance in the republic's first century....

"Limerick is one of the most engaging historians writing today." --Richard WhiteThe "settling" of the American West has been perceived throughout the world as a series of quaint, violent, and romantic adventures. But in fact, Patricia Nelson Limerick argues, the West has a history grounded primarily in economic reality; in hardheaded questions of profit, loss, competition, and consolidation. Here she interprets the stories and the characters in a new way: the trapp...

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKThe brutal and systematic “ethnic cleansing” of Chinese Americans in California and the Pacific Northwest in the second half of the nineteenth century is a shocking–and virtually unexplored–chapter of American history. Driven Out unearths this forgotten episode in our nation’s past. Drawing on years of groundbreaking research, Jean Pfaelzer reveals how, beginning in 1848, lawless citizens and duplicitous politicians pu...

A riveting true account of gold rush fever in mid-nineteenth-century America, rich with the thrilling exploits of daring fortune seekers and dangerous outlawsAmerica was never the same after January 24, 1848. It was on that day that a carpenter named James Marshall discovered a tiny nugget of gold while building a sawmill at Sutter's Fort, just east of Sacramento, California. Marshall's find ignited a fever the nation had never known before, drawing people from all ...

Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes has revised and expanded the entire work, which is still the most comprehensive and balanced history of the region. This edition contains significant additional material on early mining in the Pacific Northwest, sea routes to Oregon in the early discovery and contact period, the environment of the region, the impact of the Klondike gold rush, and politics since 1945. Recent environmental controversies, such as endangered salmon runs and the spotted owl dispute, hav...

When Europeans first arrived in North America, between five and eight million indigenous people were already living there. But how did they come to be here? What were their agricultural, spiritual, and hunting practices? How did their societies evolve and what challenges do they face today? Eminent historians Theda Perdue and Michael Green begin by describing how nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers followed the bison and woolly mammoth over the Bering land mass between Asia and what is now A...