Described as a "forest of masts," San Francisco's Gold Rush waterfront was a floating economy of ships and wharves, where a dazzling array of global goods was traded and transported. Drawing on excavations in buried ships and collapsed buildings from this period, James P. Delgado re-creates San Francisco's unique maritime landscape, shedding new light on the city's remarkable rise from a small village to a boomtown of thousands in the three short years from 1848 to 1851. Gleaning history from artifacts—preserves and liquors in bottles, leather boots and jackets, hulls of ships, even crocks of butter lying alongside discarded guns—Gold Rush Port paints a fascinating picture of how ships and global connections created the port and the city of San Francisco. Setting the city's history into the wider web of international relationships, Delgado reshapes our understanding of developments in the Pacific that led to a world system of trading.

Nothing set the world in motion like gold. Between the discovery of California placer gold in 1848 and the rush to Alaska fifty years later, the search for the precious yellow metal accelerated worldwide circulations of people, goods, capital, and technologies. A Global History of Gold Rushes brings together historians of the United States, Africa, Australasia, and the Pacific World to tell the rich story of these nineteenth century gold rushes from a global perspective. Gold was central to the growth of capitalism: it whetted the appetites of empire builders, mobilized the integration of global markets and economies, profoundly affected the environment, and transformed large-scale migration patterns. Together these essays tell the story of fifty years that changed the world.

Learn about the famous gold rush and its consequences.

A fascinating tour through BC’s historical gold rush trails, focusing on the nineteenth-century churches that were pivotal to the establishment of early settler communities. Much has been written about the Cariboo gold rush—from the trails and wagon roads to the rowdy mining camps, from tales of great luck to those of disappointment and despair. This book paints a different picture of those pioneer days. It is a guide to the nineteenth-century churches that were built during the gold rush or in the settlement days that followed. Most of these historic structures were handmade of local wood, though they differed greatly in size and style. Some are now abandoned, untenanted but still worthy of inspection. All were built to fill the spiritual need of the European migrants who flooded to the area, to nurture a sense of community that survived even after the gold was gone. Filled with beautiful colour photography and detailed maps, Pioneer Churches along the Gold Rush Trail highlights the history, geography, architecture, craftsmanship, and social context of dozens of gold rush–era churches, preserving them, in their varying states of decay, for posterity. While acknowledging the destructive forces of colonialism, including Christianity, on Indigenous Peoples, this book also examines the historical role of churches in community building and invites the reader to consider this dichotomy with an open and curious mind.

The California Gold Rush of 1848-1852 transformed San Francisco into a major city. This rapid rise, often attributed by historians to the accident of the gold discovery, is more a result of centuries-long processes of integration of the Pacific into the European world system. Integration of the Pacific occurred through maritime exploration, trade and commerce. By the mid-nineteenth century, California and its gold was another commodity in the longue durée of Pacific integration. Ships responding to the gold discovery brought mass-produced industrialized goods as well as commodities to support the growing city and its surrounding region. The role of shipping underscores how San Francisco's rise reflects the role of entrepôts, or zones of free exchange, as a model for integration, and as a new way of assessing a "frontier". San Francisco is not only an American settlement on the Pacific Coast of North America, but also a globally-linked port on the edge of the Pacific Rim. This dissertation assesses the rise of San Francisco and the role of a maritime system as an agent of the world system through historical archaeological examination of the buried Gold Rush waterfront of the city. A 9-square block area, partially burned and covered by landfill, includes well-preserved sites including partly burned fallen buildings and buried ships filled with cargo. These demonstrate how the rapidly constructed Gold Rush waterfront of moored ships, piers and buildings are macro-artifacts reflecting economic, social and political agendas in Gold Rush San Francisco. The waterfront provided the means for an ostensible mining settlement to survive the pattern of "boom or bust", and to become a critical entrepôt for United States interests in and ultimate command of Pacific and Asian trade. Analysis of these sites through a study of archival evidence, recovered artifacts and buried features interprets the maritime cultural landscape of the Gold Rush waterfront. While the Pacific by 1850 falls beyond the range of Wallerstein's original thesis for a World System, San Francisco's rapid rise is part of a frontier process linked to a "maritime system" that in itself can be incorporated within world systems theory.

"The mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes bring to mind raucous mining camps and slapped-together cities populated by carousing miners, gamblers, and prostitutes. And yet many of the white men who went to the gold fields were products of the Victorian era: the same people popularly remembered as strait-laced, repressed, and order-loving. How do we make sense of this difference? Examining the closely linked gold rushes in California and British Columbia, historian Christopher Herbert shows that gold rushers worried about the meaning of white manhood in the near-anarchic, ethnically mixed societies that grew up around the mines. Their anxieties about reproducing the white male dominance they were accustomed to played a central role in the construction of colonial regimes. As white gold rushers flocked to the mines, they encountered a wide range of people they considered inferior and potentially dangerous to white dominance, including Indigenous people, Latin Americans, Australians, and Chinese. The way that white miners interacted with these groups reflected the distinct political principles and strategies of the US and British colonial governments, as well as the ideas about race and respectability the newcomers brought with them. In addition to renovating traditional understandings of the Pacific Slope gold rushes, Herbert argues that historians' understanding of white manliness has been too fixated on the Eastern United States and Britain. In the nineteenth century, popular attention largely focused on the West, and it was in the gold fields and the cities they spawned that new ideas of white manliness emerged, prefiguring transformations elsewhere."--Provided by publisher.