An examination of the literary and cultural reaction to the Californian Gold Rush of 1849-50.

NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION 5 UNDER 35 PICK. FINALIST FOR THE VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD. LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION'S FIRST NOVEL PRIZE. Named one of the Best Books of 2018 by NPR, Bookforum and Bustle. One of Entertainment Weekly's 10 Best Debut Novels of 2018. An Amazon Best Book of the Month and named a fall read by Buzzfeed, Nylon, Entertainment Weekly, Elle, Vanity Fair, Vulture, Refinery29 and Mind Body Green A gorgeous, raw debut novel about a young woman braving the ups and downs of motherhood in a fractured America In Lydia Kiesling’s razor-sharp debut novel, The Golden State, we accompany Daphne, a young mother on the edge of a breakdown, as she flees her sensible but strained life in San Francisco for the high desert of Altavista with her toddler, Honey. Bucking under the weight of being a single parent—her Turkish husband is unable to return to the United States because of a “processing error”—Daphne takes refuge in a mobile home left to her by her grandparents in hopes that the quiet will bring clarity. But clarity proves elusive. Over the next ten days Daphne is anxious, she behaves a little erratically, she drinks too much. She wanders the town looking for anyone and anything to punctuate the long hours alone with the baby. Among others, she meets Cindy, a neighbor who is active in a secessionist movement, and befriends the elderly Alice, who has traveled to Altavista as she approaches the end of her life. When her relationships with these women culminate in a dangerous standoff, Daphne must reconcile her inner narrative with the reality of a deeply divided world. Keenly observed, bristling with humor, and set against the beauty of a little-known part of California, The Golden State is about class and cultural breakdowns, and desperate attempts to bridge old and new worlds. But more than anything, it is about motherhood: its voracious worry, frequent tedium, and enthralling, wondrous love.

This History explores the historical periods, literary genres, and cultural movements of California.

For a long time, the American West was mainly identified with white masculinity, but as more women’s narratives of westward expansion came to light, scholars revised purely patriarchal interpretations. Writing the Trail continues in this vein by providing a comparative literary analysis of five frontier narratives---Susan Magoffin’s Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico, Sarah Royce’s A Frontier Lady, Louise Clappe’s The Shirley Letters, Eliza Farnham’s California, In-doors and Out, and Lydia Spencer Lane’s I Married a Soldier---to explore the ways in which women’s responses to the western environment differed from men’s. Throughout their very different journeys---from an eighteen-year-old bride and self-styled “wandering princess” on the Santa Fe Trail, to the mining camps of northern California, to garrison life in the Southwest---these women moved out of their traditional positions as objects of masculine culture. Initially disoriented, they soon began the complex process of assimilating to a new environment, changing views of power and authority, and making homes in wilderness conditions. Because critics tend to consider nineteenth-century women’s writings as confirmations of home and stability, they overlook aspects of women’s textualizations of themselves that are dynamic and contingent on movement through space. As the narratives in Writing the Trail illustrate, women’s frontier writings depict geographical, spiritual, and psychological movement. By tracing the journeys of Magoffin, Royce, Clappe, Farnham, and Lane, readers are exposed to the subversive strength of travel writing and come to a new understanding of gender roles on the nineteenth-century frontier.

First Published in 1990. Information about individual operas and other types of musical theater is scattered throughout the enormous literature of music. This book is an effort to bring that data together by comprehensively indexing plots and descriptions of individual operatic background, criticism and analysis, musical themes and bibliographical references. The principal audience for this general reference guide will be for the non-specialist, but its hoped that persons specialising in opera would also find it useful.

In popular mythology, the Overland Trail is typically a triumphant tale, with plucky easterners crossing the Plains in caravans of covered wagons. But not everyone reached Oregon and California. Some 6,600 migrants perished along the way and were buried where they fell, often on Indigenous land. As historian Sarah Keyes illuminates, their graves ultimately became the seeds of U.S. expansion. By the 1850s, cholera epidemics, ordinary diseases, and violence had remade the Trail into an American burial ground that imbued migrant deaths with symbolic power. In subsequent decades, U.S. officials and citizens leveraged Trail graves to claim Native ground. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples pointed to their own sacred burial grounds to dispute these same claims and maintain their land. These efforts built on anti-removal campaigns of the 1820s and 30s, which had established the link between death and territorial claims on which the significance of the Overland Trail came to rest. In placing death at the center of the history of the Overland Trail, American Burial Ground offers a sweeping and long overdue reinterpretation of this historic touchstone. In this telling, westward migration was a harrowing journey weighed down by the demands of caring for the sick and dying. From a tale of triumph comes one of struggle, defined as much by Indigenous peoples' actions as it was by white expansion. And, finally, from a migration to the Pacific emerges instead one of a trail of graves. Graves that ultimately undergirded Native dispossession.

Focusing on a series of autobiographical texts, published and private, well known and obscure, Writing the Pioneer Woman examines the writing of domestic life on the nineteenth-century North American frontier. In an attempt to determine the meanings found in the pioneer woman's everyday writings -- from records of recipes to descriptions of washing floors -- Janet Floyd explores domestic details in the autobiographical writing of British and Anglo-American female emigrants.