This excellent community history of the lumber region around Eureka, California, deserves a wide readership. Cornford (San Francisco State) takes on a big question: How did the radical "republican" tradition of the American Revolution lead to the conservative corporate hierarchy of the 20th century? His case study looks at how timber and sawmill workers' attitudes toward work and politics changed from the Civil War to World War I. The author sees 19th-century America's stress on equality as double-edged: critical of the corporate enterprise, yet accommodating to paternalistic capitalism. Nineteen hundred divides US history between republic and empire; in Eureka, workers briefly developed a sense of class struggle before the mill owners permanently defeated them. Highly recommended. James W. Oberly, Univ. Of Wisconsin-Eau Claire

Yanks in the Redwoodstells the story of the exploration and settlement of the Northwest, focusing on a one-hundred-mile region of the Mendocino Coast, 70 miles north of San Francisco. Covering the period of 1800–1900, the book presents several never-before-published accounts by participants. The founders of the Humboldt Bay Community are seen through the eyes of George Gibbs, Customs Collector, Astoria, OR. A unique look at the Oregon Trail, derived from the notes jotted down by Jesse Applegate and Stanley and Clarissa Taylor, debunks the Hollywood image of the hostile Indian. Sparely-written diary entries convey the pungent flavors and kernels of wisdom squeezed out of a life of hard work in a family timber business and the almost speechless surprise when corporations quickly moved in and muscled the founders out of their own enterprises. The book contains personal accounts by John Work, leader of the Hudson Bay Co. Expedition to the North Coast, and by Jerome and Emily Ford, founders of the Mendocino Lumber Co., and the fraud investigation of Thomas J. Henley. It tells of the founding of Mendocino and Ft. Bragg, the experiences of the Chinese community, the role of "Dog Hole" schooners, and the opium trade. The book concludes with excerpts from the diary of Etta Stephens Pullen, a pioneer who relocated from Maine to Little River, California, and the transcript of an interview with Lucy Young, a Wailaki-Lassik Indian telling the grim story of genocide that was going on coincidental with events in Etta Pullen's diary. Never before has this coastal segment of Northern California been studied in a comprehensive historical book. All of the earliest participant groups, Indians, Yankees and immigrants from the Midwestern and Southern states, northern European immigrants and Chinese, are presented. Wherever possible excerpts from primary sources, written by the people who made this history, are directly quoted. This work will become an example for other Northwest coastal regions to tell their own stories for later generations to enjoy.

Labor's democratic dilemmas -- Has the forward march of labor halted? -- Labor's liberty is a social product -- How unions grew and why they stopped -- Explaining the inexplicable : accounting for the madness of moments -- When workers win : dilemmas of success -- The limits of social democracy : did success kill the labor movement? -- Reigniting the labor movement : restoring means to ends.

Nurses, show girls, housewives, farm workers, casino managers, and government inspectors—together these hard-working members of society contributed to the development of towns across the West. The essays in this volume show how oral history increases understanding of work and community in the twentieth century American West. In many cases occupations brought people together in myriad ways. The Latino workers who picked lemons together in Southern California report that it was baseball and Cinco de Mayo Queen contests that united them. Mormons in Fort Collins, Colorado, say that building a church together bonded them together. In separate essays, African Americans and women describe how they fostered a sense of community in Las Vegas. Native Americans detail the “Indian economy” in Northern California. As these essays demonstrate, the history of the American West is the story of small towns and big cities, places both isolated and heavily populated. It includes groups whose history has often been neglected. Sometimes, western history has mirrored the history of the nation; at other times, it has diverged in unique ways. Oral history adds a dimension that has often been missing in writing a comprehensive history of the West. Here an array of oral historians—including folklorists, librarians, and public historians—record what they have learned from people who have, in their own ways, made history.

Written by one of America's preeminent labor historians, this book is the definitive account of one of the most spectacular, captivating, complex and strangely neglected stories in Western history--the emergence of migratory farmworkers and the development of California agriculture. Street has systematically worked his way through a mountain of archival materials--more than 500 manuscript collections, scattered in 22 states, including Spain and Mexico--to follow the farmworker story from its beginnings on Spanish missions into the second decade of the twentieth century. The result is a comprehensive tour de force. Scene by scene, the epic narrative clarifies and breathes new life into a controversial and instructive saga long surrounded by myth, conjecture, and scholarly neglect. With its panoramic view spanning 144 years and moving from the US-Mexico border to Oregon, Beasts of the Field reveals diverse patterns of life and labor in the fields that varied among different crops, regions, time periods, and racial and ethic groups. Enormous in scope, packed with surprising twists and turns, and devastating in impact, this compelling, revelatory work of American social history will inform generations to come of the history of California and the nation.

"A forceful analysis of the role of capitalism in the history of the American West. This is an important contribution to the new western history that should be read by both historians and residents of the American West". -- Journal of American History. "This exciting book should take its place on the shelf next to Patricia Limerick's The Legacy of Conquest". -- Forest & Conservation History.

The definitive story of the California redwoods, their discovery and their exploitation, as told by an activist who fought to protect their existence against those determined to cut them down. Every year millions of tourists from around the world visit California’s famous redwoods. Yet few who strain their necks to glimpse the tops of the world’s tallest trees understand how unlikely it is that these last isolated groves of giant trees still stand at all. In this gripping historical memoir, journalist and famed redwood activist Greg King examines how investors and a growing U.S. economy drove the timber industry to cut down all but 4 percent of the original two-million-acre redwood ecosystem. King first examined redwood logging in the 1980s—as an award-winning reporter. What he found in the woods convinced him to leap the line of neutrality and become an activist dedicated to saving the very last ancient redwood groves remaining in private hands. The land grab began in 1849, when a “green gold rush” of migrants came to exploit the legendary redwoods that grew along the Russian River. Several generations later, in 1987, Greg King discovered and named Headwaters Forest—at 3,000 acres the largest ancient redwood habitat remaining outside of parks—and he led the movement to save this grove. After a decade of one of the longest, most dramatic, and violent environmental campaigns in US history, in 1999 the state and federal governments protected Headwaters Forest. The Ghost Forest explores a central question, an overhanging mystery: What was it like, this botanical Elysium that grew only along the Northern California coast, a forest so spectacular—but also uniquely valuable as a cornerstone of American economic growth—that in the end it would inspire life-and-death struggles? Few but loggers and surveyors ever saw such magnificent trees, ancient sentinels that, like ghosts, have informed King’s understanding of the world. On a lifelong journey, King finds himself through the generations, and through the trees. A Next Big Idea Club Must-Read Title