Mark Twain's legendary insight and wit shine throughout this new selection of his writings, the first to focus on California. As a young man, the celebrated author of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and other classics spent the mid-1860s in California. In this collection of essays, newspaper articles, fiction, speeches, and letters, Twain presents his notoriously unconventional views on a state booming in the wake of the gold rush. His wry humor and irreverent social commentary illuminate everything from fashion, politics, and art to earthquakes, religion, and urban crime. Drawn from hard-to-find sources as well as his ever-popular books, Gold Miners and Guttersnipes: Tales of California by Mark Twain is a fresh and distinctive assortment by one of America's favorite authors.

Drawn to Virginia City, Nevada, and its Comstock Lode in the early 1860s, journalist Henry Stoddard mingles with mining titans, speculators, and bankers as well as the men who descend into the dark earth to wrest the gold riches from it. Among those he meets are a young Missourian named Sam Clemens, a reporter for the "Territorial Enterprise" who would transform himself into Mark Twain. (August)

“A monumentally researched biography of one of the nineteenth century’s wealthiest self-made Americans…Well-written and worthwhile” (The Wall Street Journal) it’s the rags-to-riches frontier tale of an Irish immigrant who outwits, outworks, and outmaneuvers thousands of rivals to take control of Nevada’s Comstock Lode. Born in 1831, John W. Mackay was a penniless Irish immigrant who came of age in New York City, went to California during the Gold Rush, and mined without much luck for eight years. When he heard of riches found on the other side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1859, Mackay abandoned his claim and walked a hundred miles to the Comstock Lode in Nevada. Over the course of the next dozen years, Mackay worked his way up from nothing, thwarting the pernicious “Bank Ring” monopoly to seize control of the most concentrated cache of precious metals ever found on earth, the legendary “Big Bonanza,” a stupendously rich body of gold and silver ore discovered 1,500 feet beneath the streets of Virginia City, the ultimate Old West boomtown. But for the ore to be worth anything it had to be found, claimed, and successfully extracted, each step requiring enormous risk and the creation of an entirely new industry. Now Gregory Crouch tells Mackay’s amazing story—how he extracted the ore from deep underground and used his vast mining fortune to crush the transatlantic telegraph monopoly of the notorious Jay Gould. “No one does a better job than Crouch when he explores the subject of mining, and no one does a better job than he when he describes the hardscrabble lives of miners” (San Francisco Chronicle). Featuring great period photographs and maps, The Bonanza King is a dazzling tour de force, a riveting history of Virginia City, Nevada, the Comstock Lode, and America itself.

Focusing on two Arizona towns that had their origins in mining bonanzas—Tombstone and Jerome—historian Eric L. Clements offers a rare study dissecting the process of bust itself—the reasons and manners in which these towns declined as the mining booms ended. Tombstone was the site of one of the great silver bonanzas of the nineteenth century, a boom that started in the late 1870s and was over by 1890. Jerome’s copper deposits were mined for much longer, beginning in the 1880s and enduring until the 1930s. But when the mining booms ended, each town faced its decline in similar ways. The process of decline was more complex than superficial histories have indicated, and Clements discusses the role of labor unions in trying to stave off collapse, the changing demography of decline, the nature and expression of social tensions, the impact on institutions such as churches and schools, and the human responses to continued economic depression. But bust involved more than a steady decline into ghost-town status, Clements discovers: the towns' remaining residents employed numerous strategies to survive and reduce household expenses. In the end, both towns reinvented themselves as late-twentieth-century tourist attractions.

The War Criminal’s Son brings to life hidden aspects of the Civil War through the sweeping saga of the firstborn son in the infamous Confederate Winder family, who shattered family ties to stand with the Union. Gen. John H. Winder was the commandant of most prison camps in the Confederacy, including Andersonville. When Winder gave his son William Andrew Winder the order to come south and fight, desert, or commit suicide, William went to the White House and swore his allegiance to President Lincoln and the Union. Despite his pleas to remain at the front, it was not enough. Winder was ordered to command Alcatraz, a fortress that became a Civil War prison, where he treated his prisoners humanely despite repeated accusations of disloyalty and treason because the Winder name had become shorthand for brutality during an already brutal war. John Winder died before he could be brought to justice as a war criminal. Haunted by his father’s villainy, William went into a self-imposed exile for twenty years and eventually ended up at the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, to fulfill his longstanding desire to better the lot of Native Americans. In The War Criminal’s Son Jane Singer evokes the universal themes of loyalty, shame, and redemption in the face of unspeakable cruelty.

The manuscript is a collection of short stories that were originally prepared as part of a radio program that began in the early 1980's as a summer informational and educational program for Tahoe area residents and tourists. Between 1982 and 1985 the author presented more than one hundred radio tales about Tahoe’s history and the environment over Tahoe radio station KTHO AM-590. Lane returned to the radio airways in 1995, this time with radio station KOWL AM-1490, and has since broadcast more than two thousand tales (“Don Lane’s Tales of Tahoe”). The manuscript is a distinctive mixture of stories about the events, large and small, that shaped and changed the region, and simple stories about the people that once lived in our region during the past 150-years. Stories about pioneer men and women, gold-seekers and adventurers. Tales about the unique characters; the famous like the Donner’s, Mark Twain, John Sutter and James Marshall, and John Fremont, along with the powerful and the forgotten. The manuscript weaves serious history with light-hearted tales with a minimum of editorializing, as the emphasis has been on maintaining historical integrity and authenticity. The stories, gathered from old journals, archives and historical records are both entertaining, and educational. And hopefully too, this manuscript will contribute to an increased awareness of our regional history and a greater appreciation for those people that have been lost inside the pages of history.

The San Francisco Bay Area boasts one of the richest and most continuous traditions of landscape art in the entire country. Looking back over the past one hundred years, the contributors to this in-depth survey consider the diverse range of artists who have been influenced by the region's compelling union of water and land, peaks and valleys, and fog and sunlight. Paintings, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, landscape architecture, earthworks, conceptual art, and designs in city planning and architecture are all represented. The diversity reflects not just the glories of nature but also an exploration of what constitutes "landscape" in its broadest, most complete sense. Among the more than two hundred works of art are those by well-known artists and designers such as Bernard Maybeck, Diego Rivera, Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Brown, Lawrence Halprin, and Christo. Lesser-known artists are here as well, resulting in an exceptional array of approaches to the natural environment. The essays also explore key themes in the Bay Area's landscape art tradition, including the ethnic perspectives that have played an essential role in the region's art. The inexhaustible ability of the land to stimulate different personal meanings is made clear in this volume, and the effect yields a deeper understanding of how art can shape our lives in ways both spiritual and practical, how the landscape without constantly merges with the landscape within. Published in association with The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The San Francisco Bay Area boasts one of the richest and most continuous traditions of landscape art in the entire country. Looking back over the past one hundred years, the contributors to this in-depth survey consider the diverse range of artists who have been influenced by the region's compelling union of water and land, peaks and valleys, and fog and sunlight. Paintings, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, landscape architecture, earthworks, conceptual art, and designs in city planning and architecture are all represented. The diversity reflects not just the glories of nature but also an exploration of what constitutes "landscape" in its broadest, most complete sense. Among the more than two hundred works of art are those by well-known artists and designers such as Bernard Maybeck, Diego Rivera, Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Brown, Lawrence Halprin, and Christo. Lesser-known artists are here as well, resulting in an exceptional array of approaches to the natural environment. The essays also explore key themes in the Bay Area's landscape art tradition, including the ethnic perspectives that have played an essential role in the region's art. The inexhaustible ability of the land to stimulate different personal meanings is made clear in this volume, and the effect yields a deeper understanding of how art can shape our lives in ways both spiritual and practical, how the landscape without constantly merges with the landscape within. Published in association with The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.