California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History

California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History
Author :
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages : 492
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780393243079
ISBN-13 : 0393243079
Rating : 4/5 (079 Downloads)

Book Synopsis California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History by : Richard White

Download or read book California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History written by Richard White and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2021 California Book Award (Californiana category) A brilliant California history, in word and image, from an award-winning historian and a documentary photographer. “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” This indelible quote from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance applies especially well to California, where legend has so thoroughly become fact that it is visible in everyday landscapes. Our foremost historian of the West, Richard White, never content to “print the legend,” collaborates here with his son, a talented photographer, in excavating the layers of legend built into California’s landscapes. Together they expose the bedrock of the past, and the history they uncover is astonishing. Jesse White’s evocative photographs illustrate the sites of Richard’s historical investigations. A vista of Drakes Estero conjures the darkly amusing story of the Drake Navigators Guild and its dubious efforts to establish an Anglo-Saxon heritage for California. The restored Spanish missions of Los Angeles frame another origin story in which California’s native inhabitants, civilized through contact with friars, gift their territories to white settlers. But the history is not so placid. A quiet riverside park in the Tulare Lake Basin belies scenes of horror from when settlers in the 1850s transformed native homelands into American property. Near the lake bed stands a small marker commemorating the Mussel Slough massacre, the culmination of a violent struggle over land titles between local farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1870s. Tulare is today a fertile agricultural county, but its population is poor and unhealthy. The California Dream lives elsewhere. The lake itself disappeared when tributary rivers were rerouted to deliver government-subsidized water to big agriculture and cities. But climate change ensures that it will be back—the only question is when.

California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History Related Books

California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History
Language: en
Pages: 492
Authors: Richard White
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2020-03-17 - Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

GET EBOOK

Winner of the 2021 California Book Award (Californiana category) A brilliant California history, in word and image, from an award-winning historian and a docume
Octopus's Garden
Language: en
Pages: 376
Authors: Benjamin T. Jenkins
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2023-07-10 - Publisher: University Press of Kansas

GET EBOOK

As Southern California recovered from the collapse of the cattle industry in the 1860s, the arrival of railroads—attacked by newspapers as the greedy “octop
Backcountry Ghosts
Language: en
Pages: 297
Authors: Josh Sides
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021-04 - Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

GET EBOOK

California is an infamously tough place to be poor: home to about half of the entire nation's homeless population, burdened by staggering home prices and unsust
Elderflora
Language: en
Pages: 438
Authors: Jared Farmer
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2022-10-18 - Publisher: Basic Books

GET EBOOK

The epic story of the planet’s oldest trees and the making of the modern world Humans have always revered long-lived trees. But as historian Jared Farmer reve
New Women in the Old West
Language: en
Pages: 321
Authors: Winifred Gallagher
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2022-07-19 - Publisher: Penguin

GET EBOOK

A riveting and previously untold history of the American West, as seen by the pioneering women who advocated for their rights amidst challenges of migration and