Published in the year 1987, Nordhoff'S West Coast is a valuable contribution to the field of Social Science and Anthropology.

Just after the Civil War, two states prominently laid claim to being America's paradise destinations. Private companies, state agencies, and journalists all lent a hand in creating a seductive, expansionist imagery that promoted semitropical California and Florida and helped "sell" Americans on the idea of an attainable paradise within the United States. In Tropic of Hopes, Henry Knight examines the promotion of California and Florida from the end of the Civil War to the eve of the Great Depression, a period when both states were transformed from remote, sparsely populated locales into two of the most publicized and dreamed-about destinations in America. Using the discussion of climate, geography, race, and environment to link agricultural, tourist, and urban development in these regions, Knight provides a highly original and informative account.

In the late 1800s, Charles Nordhoff forged the shape of modern journalism and profoundly influenced both politicians andpolitics. Principled, activist, investigative, and a champion of the disenfranchised and poor, he was more interested incharacter and results than in personality and credit. And like the blacksmith wielding his hammer, he left us the tangibleproducts of his labors, but few details of himself. With superb research, illuminating insights, and eloquent prose, Carol Frost brings Nordhoff vividly to life: both the man andhis extraordinary impacts on politics, journalism, government, and public discourseimpacts that are still defining publiclife today. Journalists, historians, and activists will find context and inspiration in this captivating and previously untold story, a storythat in many important ways feels like it was written about the events and debates of our own time rather than those ofmore than 100 years ago.

This volume profiles 60 American journalists from colonial times to the present and focuses on news reporters, editors, publishers, and broadcasters whose careers significantly advanced or were symbolic of major changes in their profession. Illustrations, fact boxes, and quotations from the subjects themselves, together with the depth and breadth of historical information, make this volume an illuminating and fascinating read.

Beginning in the era of Manifest Destiny, U.S. settlers, writers, politicians, and boosters worked to bind California and Hawai‘i together in the American imagination, emphasizing white settlement and capitalist enterprise. In California and Hawai‘i Bound Henry Knight Lozano explores how these settlers and boosters promoted and imagined California and Hawai‘i as connected places and sites for U.S. settler colonialism, and how this relationship reveals the fraught constructions of an Americanized Pacific West from the 1840s to the 1950s. The growing ties of promotion and development between the two places also fostered the promotion of “perils” over this transpacific relationship, from Native Hawaiians who opposed U.S. settler colonialism to many West Coast Americans who articulated social and racial dangers from closer bonds with Hawai‘i, illustrating how U.S. promotional expansionism in the Pacific existed alongside defensive peril in the complicated visions of Americanization that linked California and Hawai‘i. California and Hawai‘i Bound demonstrates how the settler colonial discourses of Americanization that connected California and Hawai‘i evolved and refracted alongside socioeconomic developments and native resistance, during a time when U.S. territorial expansion, transoceanic settlement and tourism, and capitalist investment reconstructed both the American West and the eastern Pacific.

First published in 1990. Although one of Jules Verne's lesser known novels, as part of his 'Extraordinary Voyages' collection, there is still much to enjoy about 'The Floating Island'*. Written in 1895 towards the end of his career this is an adventure novel with elements of sci-fi. A French string quartet traveling from San Francisco to their next engagement in San Diego, is diverted to Standard Island. Standard Island is an immense man-made island designed to travel the waters of the Pacific Ocean. The wealth of residents of the island can only be measured in millions. The quartet is hired to play a number of concerts for the residents during their tour of the islands (Sandwich, Cook, Society, etc.) of the South Pacific. The island seems an idyllic paradise; however, it is an island divided in two. The left half's population is led by Jem Tankerdon and is known as the Larboardites. The right half's population is led by Nat Coverley and is known as the Starboardites. Despite the obstacles encountered on their journey, the two parties have a disagreement that threatens the future of the island itself.

Merchant Prince of the Sandalwood Mountains will give readers an in-depth account of one of Hawaii most intriguing personalities and the role of the Chinese in nineteenth-century Hawaii.