Josh Sides

Backcountry Ghosts (eBook, ePUB)

California Homesteaders and the Making of a Dubious Dream

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

California is an infamously tough place to be poor: home to about half of the entire nation's homeless population, burdened by staggering home prices and unsustainable rental rates, California is a state in crisis. But it wasn't always that way, as prize-winning historian Josh Sides reveals in Backcountry Ghosts. In 1862 President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, the most ambitious and sweeping social policy in the history of the United States. In the Golden State more than a hundred thousand people filed homesteading claims between 1863 and the late 1930s. More than sixty thousand Californians succeeded, claiming about ten million acres. In Backcountry Ghosts Josh Sides tells the histories of these Californian homesteaders, their toil and enormous patience, successes and failures, doggedness in the face of natural elements and disasters, and resolve to defend hard-earned land for themselves and their children. While some of these homesteaders were fulfilling the American Dream-that all Americans should have the opportunity to own land regardless of their background or station-others used the Homestead Act to add to already vast landholdings or control water or mineral rights. Sides recovers the fascinating stories of individual homesteaders in California, both those who succeeded and those who did not, and the ways they shaped the future of California and the American West. Backcountry Ghosts reveals the dangers of American dreaming in a state still reeling from the ambitions that led to the Great Recession.

---

Dieser Download kann aus rechtlichen Gründen nur mit Rechnungsadresse in A, B, BG, CY, CZ, D, DK, EW, E, FIN, F, GR, HR, H, IRL, I, LT, L, LR, M, NL, PL, P, R, S, SLO, SK ausgeliefert werden.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bison Books
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. April 2021
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781496225481
• Artikelnr.: 70884162

Autorenporträt

Josh Sides is Whitsett Professor of California History, California State University at Northridge. He is the author of L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present and Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco, winner of the Bullough Prize and the Lewis Mumford Prize.

Inhaltsangabe

List of Illustrations
Introduction
1. Not Much Else Beside
2. A Country of Plantations and Estates
3. Instant Relics
4. Hard-Bitten Country
5. Violent Paradise
6. Swindles and Salvation in the Antelope Valley
7. Mexican Lands in Mexican Hands
8. Floods and Utopias
9. Taming the Colorado Desert
10. Imperial Valley Dreams
11. Crashing the Orange Gates
12. Exacting Lives in the Breadbasket
13. The Rarified Bay Area
14. Among the Trees of the North Coast
15. Under the Shadow of Mount Lassen
Conclusion: Remembering Homesteading
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Number of Homesteads per County and Year
Notes
Bibliography
Index