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The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream (Search and Recover), by H. W. Brands
Free Ebook The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream (Search and Recover), by H. W. Brands
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Review
“An engrossing, multifaceted history.” —The New York Times“A barn burner. . . . Masterfully sketched historical figures, subtly developed themes, and epically well-braided stories. . . . There’s only one thing to say . . . and that’s ‘Eureka!’ ” —San Francisco Chronicle“Exuberant. . . . Entertaining, lively. . . . Brands [is] a wonderfully skilled narrative historian.” —Los Angeles Times“Highly readable and entertaining. . . . History titles loom large, and perhaps none larger than The Age of Gold.” —Houston Chronicle“A triumph. . . . Brands has struck gold.” —The Oregonian“[H. W. Brands] will change the way you see history. . . . The Age of Gold brilliantly pans the historical record for nuggets of hardship and, in the process, hits upon a mother lode of a story.” —Austin American-Statesman“Gripping. . . . Thoroughly researched. . . . An eminently readable, detail-filled book.” —Chicago Tribune“A serious, comprehensive study, filled with memorable visions and interesting observations. . . . A book that explores history, politics, geology, adventure and industry with omnibus enthusiasm. . . . Its author, like the miners of the gold rush themselves, leaves no stone unturned.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune“A fine, robust telling of one of the greatest adventure stories in history.” —David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize—winning author of John Adams“Brands assembles a colorful collection of people swept into this craze from around the world . . . in[to] a dazzling setting that conveys the world-changing effects of this era. . . . [He is a] master storyteller.” —The Christian Science Monitor“Few historians can tell a tale better than Brands.” —Dallas Morning News“Populated with colorful California characters. . . . Brands makes a convincing case that the discovery of gold was a seminal event in American history.” —Boston Herald“Fascinating. . . . Brands brings the era and its characters to life in a remarkably entertaining narrative that is meticulously researched and crisply written. . . . The Age of Gold is historical reporting at its best.” —Arizona Daily Star
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From the Inside Flap
"I have found it." These words, uttered by the man who first discovered gold on the American River in 1848, triggered the most astonishing mass movement of peoples since the Crusades. California's gold drew fortune-seekers from the ends of the earth. It accelerated America's imperial expansion and exacerbated the tensions that exploded in the Civil War. And, as H. W. Brands makes clear in this spellbinding book, the Gold Rush inspired a new American dream--the "dream of instant wealth, won by audacity and good luck."Brands tells his epic story from multiple perspectives: of adventurers John and Jessie Fremont, entrepreneur Leland Stanford, and the wry observer Samuel Clemens--side by side with prospectors, soldiers, and scoundrels. He imparts a visceral sense of the distances they traveled, the suffering they endured, and the fortunes they made and lost. Impressive in its scholarship and overflowing with life, The Age of Gold is history in the grand traditions of Stephen Ambrose and David McCullough.
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Product details
Series: Search and Recover (Book 2)
Paperback: 592 pages
Publisher: Anchor (October 14, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0385720882
ISBN-13: 978-0385720885
Product Dimensions:
5.2 x 1.1 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.4 out of 5 stars
112 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#169,003 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
I've been devouring books in California's Wild West period and this one stands out among the best. It's scope ranges from the Mexican American war until around the rail road connection. Brands gives us both the big picture view of the time period As well as zooms in on specific historical people, both prominent and layman, that gives a well rounded picture of this time in history. Making the book both information heavy but also easily digestible even for people not familiar with this topic. Not only that but he ties it all together with his thesis on how California's Gold Rush changed American society as a whole.Highly recommend for anyone interested in California history or history of the American Wild West.
This was the first book I've ever read by Brands and I can say that I like his style. (I also have his Andrew Jackson and American Colossus books.) He is extremely detailed but doesn't get lost in the weeds. He's also mindful of the politics of that age and it's affect on the civil war. I was fascinated to learn about the street games roaming San Francisco and how people of color got pushed out of the gold business, literally and figuratively. I was going to say that the political bits were dry, but no, they weren't. You have the creation of the republican party, with John C. Fremont as their first presidential candidate. John's wife Jessie Benton Fremont was also a formidable political figure and an opponent to slavery. This book also spends quite a bit of time showing how various people got to California. One party went through Death Valley and almost didn't make it out. The story about the poor souls that made the trip around "Cape Horn" is equally harrowing. Thinking back on the scope of this book, it's actually remarkable how Brands puts it all together in a cohesive and coherent way.
This is a focused and sweeping history of California that essentially begins with the Gold Rush of 1848. The author uses an abundance of primary sources to present this thesis - that the Gold Rush profoundly changed American and World History. This is a compelling history. The intersection of the lives of so many people, institutions and events is nothing short of astonishing.Sutter, Marshall, Fremont, Stanford, Sherman, Hearst and Hoover - all known in American history - are the foundational characters for this book. What is more interesting is how they influenced and shaped events and how those events would also shape them.This era of reckless and headlong rush would be boom and bane for individuals and the country as a whole.This book fills in many gaps that history has shortAll in all, this is a great book and great story. It is a little slow in the middle as the author uses first hand diary accounts to vividly paint a word picture of the mind set and essence of the time. But this is necessary and I encourage the reader to stay with it.
When James Marshall thought he saw a few specks of gold at the bottom of the American river near the sawmill he was building for John Sutter near Coloma California on January 25 1848 California was still a part of Mexico with the capital in Monterey; and from the Rio Grande and the Colorado to Oregon was Spanish or Indian - take your pick. - and thinly "settled" if it could be called "settled" at all. The site of San Francisco was a settlement of a few small cabins called Yerba Buena and the country that was the United States lay hundreds of miles away to the east beyond huge mountains through which only the hardy could pass and even then on small, difficult do-it-yourself trails,. But John Charles Fremont and his detachment of American soldiers had got through; and, as Marshall was making his discovery, Fremont was dashing about with his Army, cheerfully fighting a war that was fast closing down on him, a war that ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo a few days later - February 2 1848 - and which transferred ownership of and dominion over the country through which Fremont was cruising to the United States. That was the beginning Twenty years later the village of Yerba Buena was a cosmopolitan city called San Francisco; a railroad and telegraph linked California through the mountains to New York and Washington; California had millions of new residents, some called to the gold fields, some to the mines, some to the towns, some to the fields and orchards being sown and planted on thousands of acres, some to the railroad, some to finance, and some to any one of the scores of occupations so necessary to a thriving and expanding economy. Most importantly the question of slavery which had so dogged the soul of the new Republic since its founding eighty years before had been settled by a great Civil War, and California had entered the Union as a free state where slavery was not permitted. The story of what happened in those twenty years in California is told by H. G. Brands, a distinguished professor of American History at the University of Texas in Austin, in The Age of Gold. He's a great storyteller; and most of us know the story. But he tells it again - and it holds our interest: How Sam Brannan spread the word in mid to late 1848 - Gold for the picking in California! How the Argonauts flocked to the gold fields in 1849 - first from Australia and Chile and the Hawaiian Islands and China, then across the plains and over the mountains and through the desert, losing life and property along the way. What life was like in the gold fields. How Yerba Buena grew through fires and Committees of Vigilance from a spindly village to the most sophisticated city on the Pacific Coast. How the search for gold proceeded from a miner in the stream with a pan to several who were employees of a mining company behind a nozzle taking down a hill with a water cannon (placer mining) or on a dredge churning up a beautiful river bed and leaving nothing but detritus and bare rocks or digging a shaft into a lovely hillside in Mariposa and taking out gold bearing quartz and leaving the tailings behind to scar the hill forever. How the railroad was built - the Central Pacific, which so enriched Colis Huntington Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins. How the boundaries of the present day State of California became established and how it became a state midst the controversy of. In short, what happened in these twenty years - the era he has called "The Age of Gold". We already know about the people - people like Lily Langtry, Sam Clemens, Joaquin Murrieta, John Charles Fremont, William Walker - and others so familiar to us today, but Brands make them come alive again and again in this excellent book. I was particularly interested in his touch on the great compromises - the compromises between those who endorsed slavery and those who did not - compromises which subdued the great conflict for eighty years - first the compromise over the three-fifths rule in 1784, then the Missouri Compromise of 1829, then the nullification compromise of the 1830s and finally the compromise of 1850 which permitted California - which had never had status as a Territory - to enter the Union as a State with the Monterey (anti slavery) Constitution, established Utah and New Mexico as Territories without prejudice regulating slavery, made the boundaries between Texas and New Mexico final, banned the slave trade from the District of Columbia and strengthened the fugitive slave law . My only criticism of the book is that Brands goes overboard in taking the position that California in the 1850s was pretty much responsible for what happened in ther next several decades. No matter what happened in California the time for a "Compromise" over slavery had already passed when California became a part of the picture; and the California question was virtually a non-issue in the coming conflict over slavery. California added really nothing of critical value to that mix. But since 1940 California has been the essential ingredient of the mix that has been the United States in this century.
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