Mining Frontiers Of The Far West 1848 1880

"Long out of print, this study of western mining is now available with three new chapters by Elliott West. When originally published in 1963, Professor Paul's book offered the first comprehensive view of western mining as an integral part of the settlement process. In his supplemental chapters, Professor West presents a social history of mining camps - encompassing discussions of gender, class, race, labor, and the environment. The combined scholarship of Paul and West makes a strong case for the transforming effects of the mining frontier on western society in particular and American society in general. This revised, expanded edition continues to offer a distinctively vivid voice and an unusually keen eye for telling detail."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In this book, his final work, Rodman W. Paul explores the settlement of the American West in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Lured by stories of open spaces, fertile farming, & grazing lands & by the attraction of gold & silver, people from many nations traveled westward by the thousands. Early migrants rode in stagecoaches & Conestoga wagons; their successors, on the transcontinental railroads, which linked western cities with their eastern counterparts. This comprehensive history describes not only population movement & mining development but also banking, farming, ranching, & other economic ventures. In a new foreword, Martin Ridge places Paul's history in the context of contemporary scholarship. "Paul has given us an authoritative, indeed a brilliant, history of the Far West & the Great Plains as he saw it, through the lens of miners, businessmen, & immigrants." - JOURNAL OF AMERICAN HISTORY. Rodman W. Paul was Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena & the foremost historian of mining in the West. Among his many books are CALIFORNIA GOLD, MINING FRONTIERS OF THE FAR WEST, 1848-1880, & THE FRONTIER & THE AMERICAN WEST. Martin Ridge, who originally saw Paul's work through the press, is also a Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology & the author of WESTWARD EXPANSION: A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER.

A Companion to the American West is a rigorous, illuminating introduction to the history of the American West. Twenty-five essays by expert scholars synthesize the best and most provocative work in the field and provide a comprehensive overview of themes and historiography. Covers the culture, politics, and environment of the American West through periods of migration, settlement, and modernization Discusses Native Americans and their conflicts and integration with American settlers

Freedom's Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction

Denver in the Gilded Age may have been an economic boomtown, but it was also a powder keg waiting to explode. When that inevitable eruption occurred—in the Anti-Chinese Riot of 1880—it was sparked by white resentment at the growing encroachment of Chinese immigrants who had crossed the Pacific Ocean and journeyed overland in response to an expanding labor market. Liping Zhu’s book provides the first detailed account of this momentous conflagration and carefully delineates the story of how anti-Chinese nativism in the nineteenth century grew from a regional political concern to a full-fledged national issue. Zhu tells a complex tale about race, class, and politics. He reconstructs the drama of the riot—with Denver’s Rocky Mountain News fanning the flames by labeling the Chinese “the pest of the Pacific”—and relates how white mobs ransacked Chinatown while other citizens took pains to protect their Asian neighbors. Occurring two days before the national election, it had a decisive impact on sectional political alignments that would undercut the nation’s promise of equal rights for all peoples made after the Civil War and would have repercussions lasting well into the next century. By examining the relationship between the anti-Chinese movement and the rise of the West, this work sheds new light on our understanding of racial politics and sectionalism in the post-Reconstruction era. As the West’s newfound political muscle threatened Republican hegemony in national politics, many Republican legislators compromised their commitment to equal rights and unfettered immigration by joining Democrats to pass the noxious 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act—which was not repealed until 1943 and only earned congressional apologies in 2011 and 2012. The Denver Anti-Chinese Riot strikes at the core of the national debate over race and region in the late nineteenth century as it demonstrates a correlation between the national retreat from the campaign for racial equality and the rise of the American West to national political prominence. Thanks to Zhu’s powerful narrative, this once overlooked event now has a place in the saga of American history—and serves as a potent reminder that in the real world of bare-knuckle politics, competing for votes often trumps fidelity to principle.

Editions for 1954 and 1967 by O. Handlin and others.

Over the past five hundred years, North Americans have increasingly turned to mining to produce many of their basic social and cultural objects. From cell phones to cars and roadways, metal pots to wall tile and even talcum powder, mineral-intensive products have become central to modern North American life. As this process has unfolded, mining has also indelibly shaped the natural world and North Americans’ relationship with it. Mountains have been honeycombed, rivers poisoned, and forests leveled. The effects of these environmental transformations have fallen unevenly across North American societies. Mining North America examines these developments. Drawing on the work of scholars from Mexico, the United States, and Canada, this book explores how mining has shaped North America over the last half millennium. It covers an array of minerals and geographies while seeking to draw mining into the core debates that animate North American environmental history generally. Taken together, the authors' contributions make a powerful case for the centrality of mining in forging North American environments and societies.

California’s Calaveras County—made famous by Mark Twain and his celebrated Jumping Frog—is the focus of this comprehensive study of Mother Lode mining. Most histories of the California Mother Lode have focused on the mines around the American and Yuba Rivers. However, the “Southern Mines”—those centered around Calaveras County in the central Sierra—were also important in the development of California’s mineral wealth. Calaveras Gold offers a detailed and meticulously researched history of mining and its economic impact in this region from the first discoveries in the 1840s until the present. Mining in Calaveras County covered the full spectrum of technology from the earliest placer efforts through drift and hydraulic mining to advanced hard-rock industrial mining. Subsidiary industries such as agriculture, transportation, lumbering, and water supply, as well as a complex social and political structure, developed around the mines. The authors examine the roles of race, gender, and class in this frontier society; the generation and distribution of capital; and the impact of the mines on the development of political and cultural institutions. They also look at the impact of mining on the Native American population, the realities of day-to-day life in the mining camps, the development of agriculture and commerce, the occurrence of crime and violence, and the cosmopolitan nature of the population. Calaveras County mining continued well into the twentieth century, and the authors examine the ways that mining practices changed as the ores were depleted and how the communities evolved from mining camps into permanent towns with new economic foundations and directions. Mining is no longer the basis of Calaveras’s economy, but memories of the great days of the Mother Lode still attract tourists who bring a new form of wealth to the region.