Here is the ultimate historical guidebook for the Spanish Colonial Mission churches, Presidio chapels and asistencias from San Diego to Sonoma, California. As Thomas J. Steele, S.J. said, Donald Toomey has done a major favor to each visitor to any one of the missions of California. These missions -- all of them without exception -- are historic, venerable, and handsome, but they are also profoundly instructive. Donald Toomey has assembled all the basic historical facts of each mission, tracing each site from its late-eighteenth or early-nineteenth-century origin through its various disasters (fires and earthquakes predominate) and its various renovations up to the end of the twentieth century. He outlines each mission's success at achieving its purpose, and he expertly conveys to his reader his own deep appreciation of Provincial Baroque architecture, art, and church life.

California would be a different place today without the imprint of Spanish culture and the legacy of Indian civilization. The colonial Spanish missions that dot the coast and foothills between Sonoma and San Diego are relics of a past that transformed California's landscape and its people. In a spare and accessible style, Colonial Rosary looks at the complexity of California's Indian civilization and the social effects of missionary control. While oppressive institutions lasted in California for almost eighty years under the tight reins of royal Spain, the Catholic Church, and the government of Mexico, letters and government documents reveal the missionaries' genuine concern for the Indian communities they oversaw for their health, spiritual upbringing, and material needs. With its balanced attention to the variety of sources on the mission period, Colonial Rosary illuminates ongoing debates over the role of the Franciscan missions in the settlement of California. By sharing the missions' stories of tragedy and triumph, author Alison Lake underlines the importance of preserving these vestiges of California's prestatehood period. An illustrated tour of the missions as well as a sensitive record of their impact on California history and culture, Colonial Rosary brings the story of the Spanish missions of California alive.

Before the Gold Rush of 1848-1858, Alta (Upper) California was an isolated cattle frontier--and home to a colorful group of Spanish-speaking, non-indigenous people known as Californios. Profiting from the forced labor of large numbers of local Indians, they carved out an almost feudal way of life, raising cattle along the California coast and valleys. Visitors described them as a good-looking, vibrant, improvident people. Many traces of their culture remain in California. Yet their prosperity rested entirely on undisputed ownership of large ranches. As they lost control of these in the wake of the Mexican War, they lost their high status and many were reduced to subsistence-level jobs or fell into abject poverty. Drawing on firsthand contemporary accounts, the authors chronicle the rise and fall of Californio men and women.

Picked warm from a tree, a California apricot opens into halves as easily as if it came with a dotted line down its center. The seed infuses the core with a hint of almond; the fruit carries the scent of citrus and jasmine; and it tastes, some say, like manna from heaven. In these pages, Robin Chapman recalls the season when the Santa Clara Valley was the largest apricot producer in the world and recounts the stories of Silicon Valley's now lost orchards. From the Spaniards in the eighteenth century who first planted apricots in the Mission Santa Clara gardens to the post-World War II families who built their homes among subdivided orchards, relive the long summer days ripe with bumper crops of this much-anticipated delicacy.

“Nothing defines California and our nation’s heritage as significantly or emotionally,” says the California Mission Foundation, “as do the twenty-one missions that were founded along the coast from San Diego to Sonoma.” Indeed, the missions collectively represent the state’s most iconic tourist destinations and are touchstones for interpreting its history. Elementary school students today still make model missions evoking the romanticized versions of the 1930s. Does it occur to them or to the tourists that the missions have a dark history? California Mission Landscapes is an unprecedented and fascinating history of California mission landscapes from colonial outposts to their reinvention as heritage sites through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Illuminating the deeply political nature of this transformation, Elizabeth Kryder-Reid argues that the designed landscapes have long recast the missions from sites of colonial oppression to aestheticized and nostalgia-drenched monasteries. She investigates how such landscapes have been appropriated in social and political power struggles, particularly in the perpetuation of social inequalities across boundaries of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and religion. California Mission Landscapes demonstrates how the gardens planted in mission courtyards over the past 150 years are not merely anachronistic but have become potent ideological spaces. The transformation of these sites of conquest into physical and metaphoric gardens has reinforced the marginalization of indigenous agency and diminished the contemporary consequences of colonialism. And yet, importantly, this book also points to the potential to create very different visitor experiences than these landscapes currently do. Despite the wealth of scholarship on California history, until now no book has explored the mission landscapes as an avenue into understanding the politics of the past, tracing the continuum between the Spanish colonial period, emerging American nationalism, and the contemporary heritage industry.