This volume of original essays by leading scholars is an innovative, thorough introduction to the history and culture of California. Includes 30 essays by leading scholars in the field Essays range ...widely across perspectives, including political, social, economic, and environmental history Essays with similar approaches are paired and grouped to work as individual pieces and as companions to each other throughout the text Produced in association with the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West
Did Arcadia actually exist as a place? How do species evolve? Would it be possible to harness and tame a whale for human use? Natural scientists and explorers pondered a range of fascinating - and ...sometimes amusing - questions as they circumnavigated the globe in search of novel discoveries. Yet historians and other scholars tend to privilege the end results of scientific exploration rather than the process of inquiry itself. Joseph Banks initiated the role of naturalist-at-sea for government-sponsored voyages in the Pacific Ocean; among his legacies was a long genealogy of both highly trained naturalists and amateurish collectors on voyages from many imperial nations. What questions did these naturalists pose and who contributed to the alleged answers?
Studies of early modern knowledge production have recently shifted the focus away from Europe as a singular center of intellectual power and Europeans as the sole contributors to Enlightenment ...thought. In the late 18th century, the Pacific Ocean became a vast and diverse arena of scientific and cultural exploration, a waterscape in which European and American expeditions encountered indigenous groups as well as new sites for the study of nature and humanity. The Russian expedition of the Rurik (1815–1818) demonstrates many aspects of knowledge production in a Pacific maritime setting, including the stunning visual representation of indigenous communities by the artist Ludwig Choris, the active collaboration of an indigenous Marshall Islander named Kadu, and the researches of two naturalists on board the Rurik. For an expedition that failed in its stated mission to discover the Northeast Passage, the work of these individuals reveal the process and surprising outcome of intelligence gathering in an ocean world far from Europe.
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Few industrial enterprises left a more enduring imprint on the American West than Miller & Lux, a vast meatpacking conglomerate started by two San Francisco butchers in 1858. Industrial Cowboys ...examines how Henry Miller and Charles Lux, two German immigrants, consolidated the West's most extensive land and water rights, swayed legislatures and courts, monopolized western beef markets, and imposed their corporate will on California's natural environment. Told with clarity and originality, this story uses one fascinating case study to illuminate the industrial development and environmental transformation of the American West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The process by which two neighborhood butchers turned themselves into landed industrialists depended to an extraordinary degree on the acquisition, manipulation, and exploitation of natural resources. David Igler examines the broader impact that industrialism--as exemplified by Miller & Lux--had on landscapes and waterscapes, and on human as well as plant and animal life in the West. He also provides a rich discussion of the social relations engineered by Miller & Lux, from the dispossession of Californio rancheros to the ethnic segmentation of the firm's massive labor force. The book also covers such topics as land acquisition and reclamation, water politics, San Francisco's unique business environment, and the city's relation to its surrounding hinterlands. Above all, Igler highlights essential issues that resonate for us today: who holds the right and who has the power to engineer the landscape for market production?.
