This text uses the example of Henry Miller and Charles Lux, two San Francisco butchers who turned themselves into landed industrialists, to illuminate the industrial and environmental transformation of the American West.

Few books have caused as big a stir as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, when it was published in April 1939. By May, it was the nation's number one bestseller, but in Kern County, California -- the Joads' newfound home -- the book was burned publicly and banned from library shelves. Obscene in the Extreme tells the remarkable story behind this fit of censorship. When W. B. "Bill" Camp, a giant cotton and potato grower, presided over its burning in downtown Bakersfield, he declared: "We are angry, not because we were attacked but because we were attacked by a book obscene in the extreme sense of the word." But Gretchen Knief, the Kern County librarian, bravely fought back. "If that book is banned today, what book will be banned tomorrow?" Obscene in the Extreme serves as a window into an extraordinary time of upheaval in America -- a time when, as Steinbeck put it, there seemed to be "a revolution . . . going on."

Winner of Columbia University's 2024 Bancroft Prize in American History 2024 Spur Award Winner Named a Best Civil War Book of 2023 by Civil War Monitor In Continental Reckoning renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations. Thirty years later it was organized into states and territories and bound into the nation and world by an infrastructure of rails, telegraph wires, and roads and by a racial and ethnic order, with its Indigenous peoples largely dispossessed and confined to reservations. Unprecedented exploration uncovered the West’s extraordinary resources, beginning with the discovery of gold in California within days of the United States acquiring the territory following the Mexican-American War. As those resources were developed, often by the most modern methods and through modern corporate enterprise, half of the contiguous United States was physically transformed. Continental Reckoning guides the reader through the rippling, multiplying changes wrought in the western half of the country, arguing that these changes should be given equal billing with the Civil War in this crucial transition of national life. As the West was acquired, integrated into the nation, and made over physically and culturally, the United States shifted onto a course of accelerated economic growth, a racial reordering and redefinition of citizenship, engagement with global revolutions of science and technology, and invigorated involvement with the larger world. The creation of the West and the emergence of modern America were intimately related. Neither can be understood without the other. With masterful prose and a critical eye, West presents a fresh approach to the dawn of the American West, one of the most pivotal periods of American history.

This is the first comprehensive environmental history of California’s Great Central Valley, where extensive freshwater and tidal wetlands once provided critical habitat for tens of millions of migratory waterfowl. Weaving together ecology, grassroots politics, and public policy, Philip Garone tells how California’s wetlands were nearly obliterated by vast irrigation and reclamation projects, but have been brought back from the brink of total destruction by the organized efforts of duck hunters, whistle-blowing scientists, and a broad coalition of conservationists. Garone examines the many demands that have been made on the Valley’s natural resources, especially by large-scale agriculture, and traces the unforeseen ecological consequences of our unrestrained manipulation of nature. He also investigates changing public and scientific attitudes that are now ushering in an era of unprecedented protection for wildlife and wetlands in California and the nation.

"[A] fascinating and indispensable book."—Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Best Books of 2018—The Guardian Gold Medal for Contribution to Publishing, 2018 California Book Awards Carleton Watkins (1829–1916) is widely considered the greatest American photographer of the nineteenth century and arguably the most influential artist of his era. He is best known for his pictures of Yosemite Valley and the nearby Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias. Watkins made his first trip to Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove in 1861 just as the Civil War was beginning. His photographs of Yosemite were exhibited in New York for the first time in 1862, as news of the Union’s disastrous defeat at Fredericksburg was landing in newspapers and while the Matthew Brady Studio’s horrific photographs of Antietam were on view. Watkins’s work tied the West to Northern cultural traditions and played a key role in pledging the once-wavering West to Union. Motivated by Watkins’s pictures, Congress would pass legislation, signed by Abraham Lincoln, that preserved Yosemite as the prototypical “national park,” the first such act of landscape preservation in the world. Carleton Watkins: Making the West American includes the first history of the birth of the national park concept since pioneering environmental historian Hans Huth’s landmark 1948 “Yosemite: The Story of an Idea.” Watkins’s photographs helped shape America’s idea of the West, and helped make the West a full participant in the nation. His pictures of California, Oregon, and Nevada, as well as modern-day Washington, Utah, and Arizona, not only introduced entire landscapes to America but were important to the development of American business, finance, agriculture, government policy, and science. Watkins’s clients, customers, and friends were a veritable “who’s who” of America’s Gilded Age, and his connections with notable figures such as Collis P. Huntington, John and Jessie Benton Frémont, Eadweard Muybridge, Frederick Billings, John Muir, Albert Bierstadt, and Asa Gray reveal how the Gilded Age helped make today’s America. Drawing on recent scholarship and fresh archival discoveries, Tyler Green reveals how an artist didn’t just reflect his time, but acted as an agent of influence. This telling of Watkins’s story will fascinate anyone interested in American history; the West; and how art and artists impacted the development of American ideas, industry, landscape, conservation, and politics.

"Jan Goggans has found a wonderful way to explore the rich history of 1930s California: by giving us a deep look at the indispensable work of economist Paul Taylor and photographer Dorothea Lange, the brilliant husband-wife team whose classic from '39, An American Exodus, deserves a spot on the shelf right next to The Grapes of Wrath. With prose that's as insightful as Taylor's own and as vivid as a Lange photograph, California on the Breadlines both captures and contextualizes this hugely important period. Goggans's book will surely find its own place in the canon of Californiana."--Rick Wartzman, author of Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath "During the Great Depression, Paul Taylor and Dorothea Lange took to the embattled fields of California on behalf of a suffering nation. This elegant narrative presents the national service and shared passion of two talented Americans swept up by the drama of their times and their growing discovery of each other."--Kevin Starr, University of Southern California "A rich and gorgeous book, and an elegant treatment of the complex and fascinating personal/professional relationship between husband and wife, labor economist Paul Taylor and photographer Dorothea Lange. Their photojournalism gave face and voice to the mute shuffling in 1930s California breadlines, etching into the national mind the greatest sufferers in a decade of agony. Professor Goggans' study is seminal in 21st century California studies: thoroughly researched, critically sophisticated and global in imagination, a pleasure to pore over and read through. California on the Breadlines is a true and riveting narrative of the rare, singular partnership between Lange and Taylor."--Jack Hicks, co-editor of The Literature of California, Volume I "This is an extraordinary book. Goggans elegantly interweaves sound scholarship with the moving human stories of California's Dust Bowl immigrants. In bringing the agony of Depression-era California home to the nation, we immediately think of John Steinbeck and Carey McWilliams. But Goggans makes it dramatically clear that Taylor and Lange, labor economist and photographer, husband and wife, fused documentary photojournalism and the traditions of protest literature to create a new form that was at least as essential in telling that story and in proposing remedies. As such, California on the Breadlines is a powerful reminder that even in terrible economic times, when Americans are willing, hope and imagination are always possible."--Peter Schrag, author of Not Fit for Our Society: Immigration and Nativism in America "A major contribution, meticulously researched and written. Goggans refracts the complex histories of California labor and migration through the lens of Lange and Taylor's fieldwork, landmark images, and remarkable marriage. Rare in scholarship, this book narrates history's epic arc alongside the more intimate story of Lange and Taylor, providing a wealth of insights on the Great Depression that reads like the Great American novel."--John T. Caldwell, author of Production Culture and director of Rancho California (por favor) "California on the Breadlines offers a compelling analysis of how Lange's and Taylor's work grew out of their shared social concerns and how that work offers a unique portrait of the cultural imagination of their time--which of course, their work also helped to shape."--Terry Beers, author of Gunfight at Mussel Slough: Evolution of a Western Myth "Goggans provides an accessible and compelling account of the path that brought Paul Taylor and Dorothea Lange together and led them to dedicate their lives and work to documenting conditions of poverty in California."--Flannery Burke, author of From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's

"Over the past five hundred years, North Americans have increasingly turned to mining to produce many of their basic social and cultural objects. From cell phones to cars and roadways, metal pots to wall tile and even talcum powder, minerals products have become central to modern North American life. As this process has unfolded, mining has also indelibly shaped the natural world and North Americans' relationship with it. Mountains have been honeycombed, rivers poisoned, and forests leveled. The effects of these environmental transformations have fallen unevenly across North American societies. Mining North America examines these developments. Drawing on the work of scholars from Mexico, the United States, and Canada, this book explores how mining has shaped North America over the last half millennium. It covers an array of minerals and geographies while seeking to draw mining into the core debates that animate North American environmental history generally. Taken together, the authors' contributions make a powerful case for the centrality of mining in forging North American environments and societies"--Provided by publisher.