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A World Transformed: Firsthand Accounts of California Before the Gold Rush
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A World Transformed: Firsthand Accounts of California Before the Gold Rush
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by Joshua Paddison
Sales Rank : 293713
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Paperback: 344 pages
Publisher: Heyday Books March 1999
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1890771139
ISBN-13: 978-1890771133
Product Dimensions:
8.9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
From Booklist
Writer-historian Paddison brings together 11 eyewitness accounts of California from the mid-1700s up to the gold rush days of the 1840s. Though not strictly politically correct (one contributor refers to local Native Americans as "well-behaved good heathens"), there's a wealth of fascinating information here, including observations on all of the strange flora and fauna and detailed descriptions of native customs, daily life, and reactions to white visitors. The first accounts are from Spanish missionaries and explorers. Later, though, it's the British and Americans documenting life in California, a shift that signaled Spain's increasingly tenuous grip on this faraway territory. Interestingly, as the accounts progress, it's clear the merchant class is beginning to dominate California culturally and politically, especially in the San Francisco Bay area. Paddison's introductions to the various entries expertly flesh out the ever changing social and political contexts. Brian McCombie
From Kirkus Reviews
A useful collection of European and American accounts of California as it looked before 1848. Joining Heyday Books' strong list in revisionist-tending Californiana, freelance historian/journalist Paddisons collection draws on published reports that in many cases are available in English only in scholarly journals. He observes that the earliest European explorers, Spanish soldiers and missionaries, were initially unimpressed with what they saw: Early descriptions of California, he writes, were favorable but unenthusiastic, and Spain was unready and unwilling to invest the ships, supplies, and people necessary to settle such a far-flung land already inhabited by possibly warlike Indians. After neglecting their discovery for two centuries, Spain eventually turned to California in 1765 to establish a buffer against the encroaching French and British. Paddison opens his anthology with an account by Juan Cresp, a missionary on the Portol expedition, who surveyed the area around Monterey Bay and described it as a grand place this for a very large plenteous mission, with great amounts of good soil and trees . . . and great numbers of heathens, the finest and best-mannered that have been met in the whole journey. The Spanish kept California to themselves only for a short time; soon thereafter the English seafarer George Vancouver arrived in San Francisco Bay, not long after a French navigator named Jean Francois de La Prouse published a widely read journal that exalted the region, saying, no country is more abundant in fish and game of every description. Soon after, as Paddison's selections make clear, came Russians and Germans and, eventually, Americans, all seeking to make California their own. Paddisons anthology, accompanied by intelligent essays on aspects of the Golden States past, offers a trove of information to students of California history and general readers with an interest in the area. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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