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This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

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A critical era in California's history and development--the building of the first roads over the Sierra Nevada--is thoroughly and colorfully documented in Thomas Howard's fascinating book. During California's first two decades of statehood (1850-1870), the state was separated from the east coast by a sea journey of at least six weeks. Although Californians expected to be connected with the other states by railroad soon after the 1849 Gold Rush, almost twenty years elapsed before this occurred. Meanwhile, various overland road ventures were launched by "emigrants," former gold miners, state government officials, the War Department, the Interior Department, local politicians, town businessmen, stagecoach operators, and other entrepreneurs whose alliances with one another were constantly shifting. The broad landscape of international affairs is also a part of Howard's story.
Constructing roads and accumulating geographic information in the Sierra Nevada reflected Washington's interest in securing the vast western territories formerly held by others. In a remarkably short time the Sierra was transformed by vigorous exploration, road-promotion, and road-building. Ox-drawn wagons gave way to stagecoaches able to provide service as fine as any in the country. Howard effectively uses diaries, letters, newspaper stories, and official reports to recreate the human struggle and excitement involved in building the first trans-Sierra roads. Some of those roads have become modern highways used by thousands every day, while others are now only dim traces in the lonely backcountry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Very enjoyable
I found Howard's book to be very informative filled with a multitude of excellent primary and secondary sources that has caused me to increase my library with six new books! Howard has done his homework well, although I could add a new source to his list with the inclusion of Lewis Gunn's, Records of a California Family (page 217) since Gunn describes the emigrants after arriving in Sonora having crossed the Sierras using the unforgiving Sonora Pass route. One can tell he completely enjoyed doing his research through his fine style of writing and comparative photographs. The book is not "insuperable" by any means for the average reader. Excellent!

First roads to California.
Scholarly yes, dry absolutely.I know the author is a Professor, but you need to appeal to your readers.There was some good research into this book, and it is obvious the author traversed some of the roads himself.However, why not elaborate on some of the tales of those emigrants coming into California.This was a relatively short book, but it took me nearly four days for me to read.That said, the author explores new ground on the hardships of people going overland to California.This is a story that needs telling.

This book is for those interested in California history.It is more focused toward the academic audience, and a general reader has to have a great desire to learn more about this subject. ... Read more

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Provides an overview of the state of California, covering its history, geography, economy, people, and points of interest. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great Pictures, Perfect Size
These are a nice series of books that do a good job of covering the essence of an entire state without being too big. ... Read more

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What explains California? To a large extent, as Philip Fradkin's rich, exuberant portrait makes clear, it's the multiple landscapes and the different states of mind that best define America's most populous, diverse, and fabled state. Fradkin divides California into seven distinct ecological and cultural provincesfrom the hot deserts and high peaks to the rich agricultural Central Valley, the redwood forests of the north and sandy beaches of the south. Describing geographical regions based on their emblematic landscape features, Fradkin intertwines natural and social history. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Why the Golden State is golden, despite its flaws
I picked this book up as natural history, and have indeed learned much about it, getting beyond a simple coast/valley/mountains/desert mindset into the different mountain regions, their formation and more.

Of course, it's arguable that the way Fradkin breaks up the coast ranges into separate sections is more social history than natural history. But that's fine.

Speaking of that, his phrase names for each section also reflect social history as much as natural history. And are insightful in both ways.

Fradkin paints a good social history, not just of California as a whole but each of its regions individually, such as loggers in the northern coast, corporate farmers in the Central Valley, the paradoxes of Los Angeles, and so forth.

I would recommend this book to native or semi-native Californios as a fresh look at their state, as well as to outsiders.

A People's History of California....
A great book and a good read.Patrica Nelson Limerick's Legacy of Conquest meets John McPhee's Assembling California.Part human geography, part revisionist history, part travel narrative, Fradkin looks at events big and small from a perspective other than the railroad, mining, and timber barons, and the civic boosters of the Golden State.One focus is on the untold stories of the Native Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Irish and the others marginalized in previous histories. Another focus is the realm of the natural world (Grizzly bear, salmon, the Cascade volcanos e.g.)and how it influenced the past and how it is reflected into the present, sometimes ironically. Fredkin weaves these together with his personal experience and research and produces a very readable, entertaining and often disconcerting whole. I have spent much time in the past reseaching California's history for professional and academic purposes and this book taught me much.Highly recommended.

Great social/environmental history
Although the books is billed as presenting an ecological history ofCalifornia, it appears that this is mainly to help sell it. Where Fradkinexcels is in uncovering little-known social history, particularly aroundracial strife. There's a lot of us-vs-them in this state's history that'srarely talked about. The great thing is, the author presents a coherent,readable history, rather than a tiresome sermon from a soapbox. Worth aread.

No glory but much death.
This was not the book that I expected to read, and I don't mean this in a good way.

To a large degree, Fradkin's goal is to pierce the illusion of the biggest marketing scam in North American history, that of GoldenCalifornia. .... Comments such as "modern California was founded on greedand violence" only lead me to respond what empire wasn't?...

What saves the book isthat Fradkin does love the state regardless of what has happened in thepast, and he does know his history. .... ... Read more

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The postborder metropolis of Bajalta California stretches from Los Angeles in the north to Tijuana and Mexicali in the south. Immigrants from all over the globe flock to Southern California, while corporations are drawn to the low wage industry of the Mexican border towns, echoing developments in other rapid growth areas such as Phoenix, El Paso, and San Antonio. This incredibly diverse, transnational megacity is giving birth to new cultural and artistic forms as it rapidly evolves into something unique in the world. Mixed Feelings is a genuinely interdisciplinary investigation of the hybrid culture on both sides of the increasingly fluid U.S. - Mexico border, spanning the disciplines of art and art history, urban planning, geography, Latina/o studies, and American studies. ... Read more

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Ethnic and nonconformist communities, despite their frequent proximity, seldom are analyzed as interlocking elements of the metropolitan core. In this comparative study of San Francisco neighborhoods, Brian Godfrey contrasts the formation of ethnic enclaves by European, Asian, Black, and Hispanic groups with the emergence of Bohemian, counter-cultural, and gay communities.He focuses especially closely on Latin American immigration into the Mission District and gentrification in the Haight-Ashbury. To explain the historical geography of such inner-city neighborhoods, the author proposes alternate sequences of community evolution, based on the interplay of social class and subcultural forces. He shows howboth ethnic and nontraditional minority communities tend to form initially in declining central neighborhoods, with their divergent successional processes reflectingcharacteristic differences in social mobility and cultural cohesion. ... Read more

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This book was the first broad expos of the social and environmental damage inflicted by the growth of corporate agriculture in California. Factories in the Field--together with the work of Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor, and John Steinbeck--dramatizes the misery of the dust bowl migrants hoping to find work in California agriculture. McWilliams starts with the scandals of the Spanish land grant purchases, and continues on to examine the experience of the various ethnic groups that have provided labor for California's agricultural industry--Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos, Armenians--the strikes, and the efforts to organize labor unions ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Smashing myths
"Factories in the field" opened my eyes in a few ways.First, it shows that the history of California agribusiness isn't a post WWII creation as I thought.California agribusiness came out of the Spanish land grants that Americans of the U.S. variety exploited after the gold rush. Nineteenth century agribusiness was a time of giant farms and massive harvest of crops such as wheat.Second, that the history of the exploitation of farm workers also goes back to the nineteenth centure and while the ethnicity might change, the approach to these workers does not.Workers should be powerless and paid as little as possible.They should be provided the very minimum in living conditions and disappear after the harvest, not calling attention to themselves if they end up in the cities placing demands on municipalities causing the growers political trouble.

Finally, I learned that when a particular group of farm workers got uppity, the government would pass laws stripping them of their land and/or making it possible to acquire new property.If these groups striked, then the vigilantees inflicted violence on the workers and disrupted their strikes and had them imprisoned.

Carey McWilliams does a great job both of providing a social history of agribusiness in California and of showing why workers must never give up the struggle for social justice because the moneyed forces are always working to keep their wages down and their voices silenced.

No NEW DEAL in Paradise
A quick look at the index of Carey McWilliams's "Factories in the Field" finds not a single reference to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Should that be surprising? Given that the book was first published in 1939, I believe it should. But in this "Story of Magratory Farm Labor in California," neither the New Deal or the Great Depression followed the same script as in the rest of the country. 1939 was also the year of publication of John Steinbeck's great novel "Grapes of Wrath." The two books have been linked ever since, one as documentation for the other, even though McWilliams published first.

The "dustbowl refugees" of Steinbeck's fiction were white Americans, fleeing from the Depression and the folly of pioneer agriculture in an area unsuitable to family farming. They do turn up in Factories in the Fields, as victims of exploitation and violence, but Steinbeck knowingly overlooked the majority of migrant workers in California in the 1930s (and earlier and later), who were not white transplants from the poor South but rather Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, and eventually prodominently Mexican. McWilliams describes in convincing terms how the nascent "industrial farmers" of California used racism, inter-ethnic competition, anti-union sentiments, and the pro-business partiality of American labor law not only to exploit the poorest of the poor unconscionably but also to consolidate huge holdings in some of America's richest farm land. The landest land-holding, that of the King family, is still around, and if I remember correctly it's larger than any of a half-dozen small states. The chapters in which McWilliams describes the violence, cloaked in legality, with which all efforts to organize migratory workers to defend their right to the Pursuit of Happiness are graphic and heart-rending.

One era's historiography often becomes the source material for historians of later eras, and this is surely the case of Factories in the Fields. Sixty years later it's a vivid window into the mentality of earnest reformers of the New Deal, who had plenty to be passionate about. But Factories in the Fields not only was history; it also made history. Few books on such an obscure subject have had such long-term influence. I can state with certainty that without this book the efforts of Cesar Chavez, one of America's greatest heroes, would not have had half the chance of success; the boycotts that created the United Farm Workers were led by people who knew about migrant labor chiefly through McWilliams. Even today, the cautious distrust many people feel toward the Bush Republican proposals to create a pool of non-immigrant guest workers reflects the memory of the exploitative "bracero" program that was terminated in the 1960s through protests from, once again, people who'd read Factories in the Fields.

I've recently reviewed two other studies of the New Deal era - "The Political Life of Floyd B. Olson" and "The New Deal and the Iroquois". My central point in these reviews has been to remind people, especially conservatives, of the complexity of conditions, and of political responses to conditions, in the Depression decade. FDR was not the whole story. There was no New Deal for migratory workers, though there should have been.

Factories in the Field
An excellent book for anyone interested in California History, US History, the Great Depression or the history of corporate agriculture.Originally released the same year as Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, McWilliams' book relates the history of not only migrant farm labor in California, but the corporate farm as well. Having included extensive background on California's 19th Century land grab, McWilliams presents a comprehensive look at corporate agriculture, including its effect on various labor groups and the economy of the State of California.Written with a definite bias toward the underdog (the migrant worker), Factories in the Field nevertheless provides the reader with an understanding of the beginnings of corporate economy in California and its true beginnings in agriculture, including an explanation of the power of the ag growers--a political hot potato that continues in the state today. ... Read more

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This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

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Title: History of San Mateo County, California, Including Its Geography, Topography, Geology, Climatography, and Description, Together With an Historical Sketch of California; a Record of the Mexican Grants; the Early History and Settlement, Compiled From the Most Authentic Sources; Some of the Names of Spanish and American Pioneers; Legislative History; a Record of Its Cities and Towns; Biographical Sketches of Representative Men; Etc., EtcPublisher: San Francisco, Cal., B.F. AlleyPublication date: 1883Subjects: San Mateo County (Calif.) -- HistorySan Mateo County (Calif.) -- BiographyNotes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be numerous typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes.When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there. ... Read more

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Publisher: San Francisco : Alley, BowenPublication date: 1880Subjects: Mendocino County (Calif.) -- HistoryMendocino County (Calif.) -- BiographyNotes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be numerous typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes.When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there. ... Read more

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This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing’s Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

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This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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PREFACE THE preparation of a supplementary geography of California involves serious difficulties. No other state in the Union has such a diversity of climate, of physical fea.tures, anll of products. To furnish in one hundred pages of text a description of the state, its life, and resources which shall be sufficiently broad in scope, and not a mere enumeration of facts, is no easy task. How well the author has succeeded must be left to the teachers 'and pupils to decide. In 'accordance with the plan worked out in the other volumes of the series, the geographic facts are treated in a manner to bring out as fully as possible their causal l'elations. Facts which under the older methods vere grouped together as a mere series to be memorized, are in the supplement discussed as fa.r as possible in their natural relations. Through the interest thus aroused the facts are not only more easily acquired, but also more apt to be retained. Owing to the marked differences in

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS; PAnE; INTRODUCTION ? :xi; l'UY810GRAPHT OF THE CORDILLERAN REGIO~'- xiii; PUYSIOGRAPHY OF CALIFonNIA 1; Helief 1; Physiographic Provinces 3; ORIGIN OF TUE MOUNTAINS AND VALLJ,;YS OF CALIFORNIA 5; DRAISAGE" 7; ~Io"'E)IE:"TS OF TilE LAS/) 10; TUE ISLANI>S AND SUDMARJX"$ l>LATEAU ? 13; CLHlATE 15; VJ:::GETATlON AND A:SUIAL La"I-; 10; NATURAL RESOURCES 24; HISTORY AND INDOSTRlAI l));VELOPMENT; Discovery "; Spanish Settlement; Indians; American Exploration and Conquest; Discovery of Gold; llining; Stock-raising and Agriculture; ~[eaIlI! of Communication ; Development of Fruit Industries; TOE StERRA NEVADA PROVINCE; Extent and History; vii; -&6; 26; 27; 2!J; 30; 32; 34; 35; 36; 37; 38; 38; Vlll TABLE OF COJVTENTS; Gold Mining; Forests and Lumbering; Other Occupations; The Great Canons; The Former Glaciers ; Water ... Read more

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As the twentieth century drew to a close, the rich were getting richer; power was concentrating within huge corporations; vast tracts of the earth were being laid waste; three quarters of the earth's population had no control over its destiny and no claim to basic rights. There was nothing new in this. What was new was the virtual absence of any political will to do anything about it. Spaces of Hope takes issue with this.
David Harvey brings an exciting perspective to two of the principal themes of contemporary social discourse: globalization and the body. Exploring the uneven geographical development of late-twentieth-century capitalism, and placing the working body in relation to this new geography, he finds in Marx's writings a wealth of relevant analysis and theoretical insight. In order to make much-needed changes, Harvey maintains, we need to become the architects of a different living and working environment and to learn to bridge the micro-scale of the body and the personal and the macro-scale of global political economy.
Utopian movements have for centuries tried to construct a just society. Harvey looks at their history to ask why they failed and what the ideas behind them might still have to offer. His devastating description of the existing urban environment (Baltimore is his case study) fuels his argument that we can and must use the force of utopian imagining against all who say "there is no alternative." He outlines a new kind of utopian thought, which he calls dialectical utopianism, and refocuses our attention on possible designs for a more equitable world of work and living with nature. If any political ideology or plan is to work, he argues, it must take account of our human qualities. Finally, Harvey dares to sketch a very personal utopian vision in an appendix, one that leaves no doubt about his own geography of hope. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A bit dry, but brilliant.
There's a lot of theory here.
Don't let it scare you away.

This book is a brilliant examination of ideas that run modern society in America--and ideas that could have, but didn't. Harvey asks hard, delicate questions that poke at the very framework of modern society and makes you question assumptions about people and cities that you didn't even realize you had. Utopia has never been so interesting.

The appendix, in which Harvey delineates a society wherein he uses the ideas he describes in the book, is extremely interesting and contradictory. Worth the price of the book alone.

Time and Space and Karl Marx
In his introduction to "Spaces of Hope," David Harvey relates how much the times have changed since he began teaching Marx's Capital in the early 1970s. Back then, he didn't openly specify the content of the class in the course catalog -- he felt sure the powers that were at Johns Hopkins at the time would shut him down. At that time, he tells us, no one in U.S. academia (except for a few foreign professors) had ever really read Marx. The interest at that time was directly related to the recent "revolutionary" fervor time of the late 60s/early 70s wherein Mao and Che Guevera, the Weather Underground, etc., were countercultural icons and Marx's Captial was seen to be the source of their revolutionary program. When the Berlin wall came down, Marx's reputation as came down with it. Now, thirty years after he started teaching it, Harvey finds he has fewer students than ever, but that the text itself is perhaps even more relevant now than it has ever been. He notes that convincing others of its relevance is a difficlt task these days partly because there is no political apparatus to give weight to Marx's ideas, but also because post-modernism and identity politics have tended to denigrate mass political movements as "master narratives" that cannot be trusted. Harvey thinks it's time to get a new revolution going, and he thinks Marx's observations go a long way toward helping us think clearly about the world in which we live and how we might change it.

After the personal note sounded in the introduction, Harvey then takes up his real program which is a history of the production of space and under capitalism in the service of trying to create his new revolutionary consciousness to ameliorate, sabotage, rewrite, or replace the prevailing capitalist discourse with new ways of seeing our bodies, the spaces we create and live in. He discusses our impact on the earth and other species and explores new forms of consciousness that grow out of that new sensitivity. At the center of the book is an examination of how deindustrialization has gutted his Baltimore over the past 30 years he's lived there, the rise of the racialized service economy, the rise of the real estate speculators in cahoots with city planners giving massive tax abatements in mostly failed attempts to revitalize the city. This is a subject Harvey knows intimately, and in his description of Baltimore's woes he tells the disheartening story of so many mid-sized American cities which have been struggling to stay afloat during the exportation of blue collar jobs starting in the 70s.Harvey's chapters on the body as an accumulation strategy (quoting Donna Haraway) offer a good history and discussion of the post-modern rejection of the Des Cartes body/mind duality. He considers the body in the Foucauldian sense of society and its spaces and regimes enforcing discipline and docility, and also considers how our bodies are shaped by capital -- work hours, repetitive acts, the food we eat, the tobacco we smoke -- but interestingly, also discusses the body in terms of variable capital, Marx's terminology.

Harvey does a credible job of resurrecting a classic for a new generation, showing how it relates to current postmodern themes. One of his best ideas is to see that we have been in the process of creating utopias in two main ways over the past 500 years or so. The grounded utopias of Sir Thomas More and others, who draw maps and imagine the human relations that might occur in the spaces they create, and the "process utopias" like Adam Smith's view of the invisible hand of captilism making us all better, clothing us, feeding us, improving us. Harvey's most powerful explorations have to do with how capital has created the spaces that capital requires, mostly to the detriment of people, but to the benefit of capital.

Past the 3rd way
In this work, Harvey seems much more explicitly concerned with the political than in his previous works.While his former works provide excellent an analysis of the present situation, it is this book that takes that total (Marxist) critique, and then provides an analytic from which effective political resistance to the third way might emerge.He argues that those in opposition must be, in some ways, Utopian; that a large part of the failure of critiques of the third way have been that they can dangle no carrot that looks any better.

An understanding of Harvey's prior works, especially Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, as well as Limits to Capital would probably be very helpful to a complete understanding of this work. ... Read more