A fascinating account of a horseback trip to Yosemite and the High Sierra by a group from the University of California in 1870. The ten scholars were led by Professor Joseph LeConte, a popular instructor and an expert in a number of the natural sciences, particularly geology.

In 1870, LeConte embarked on a five-week horseback trip to Yosemite Valley and the High Sierra with a party that included other University of California students and faculty. The group would soon start a campaign to establish today’s Yosemite National Park and to promote more recreational use of the Sierra. Some of this group’s members were also responsible for urging the founding of the Sierra Club in 1892, with LeConte himself serving as director of the club for several years. A prolific author on a wide array of subjects, LeConte died during a 1901 Sierra Club excursion in Yosemite.

From ski towns to national parks, fresh fruit to environmental lawsuits, the Sierra Nevada has changed the way Americans live. Whether and where there was gold to be mined redefined land, mineral, and water laws. Where rain falls (and where it doesn't) determines whose fruit grows on trees and whose appears on slot machines. All this emerges from the geology of the range and how it changed history, and in so doing, changed the country. The Mountains That Remade America combines geology with history to show how the particular forces and conditions that created the Sierra Nevada have effected broad outcomes and influenced daily life in the United States in the past and how they continue to do so today. Drawing connections between events in historical geology and contemporary society, Craig H. Jones makes geological science accessible and shows the vast impact this mountain range has had on the American West.

This second volume in Kevin Starr's passionate and ambitious cultural history of the Golden State focuses on the turn-of-the-century years and the emergence of Southern California as a regional culture in its own right. "How hauntingly beautiful, how replete with lost possibilities, seems that Southern California of two and three generations ago, now that a dramatically diferent society has emerged in its place," writes Starr. As he recreates the "lost California," Starr examines the rich variety of elements that figured in the growth of the Southern California way of life: the Spanish/Mexican roots, the fertile land, the Mediterranean-like climate, the special styles in architecture, the rise of Hollywood. He gives us a broad array of engaging (and often eccentric) characters: from Harrision Gray Otis to Helen Hunt Jackson to Cecil B. DeMille. Whether discussing the growth of winemaking or the burgeoning of reform movements, Starr keeps his central theme in sharp focus: how Californians defined their identity to themselves and to the nation.