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This unique analysis of the rise of the juvenile justice system from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries uses one of the harshest states—California—as a case study for examining racism in the treatment of incarcerated young people of color. Using rich new untapped archives, States of Delinquency is the first book to explore the experiences of young Mexican Americans, African Americans, and ethnic Euro-Americans in California correctional facilities including Whittier State School for Boys and the Preston School of Industry. Miroslava Chávez-García examines the ideologies and practices used by state institutions as they began to replace families and communities in punishing youth, and explores the application of science and pseudo-scientific research in the disproportionate classification of youths of color as degenerate. She also shows how these boys and girls, and their families, resisted increasingly harsh treatment and various kinds of abuse, including sterilization.

The West without Water documents the tumultuous climate of the American West over twenty millennia, with tales of past droughts and deluges and predictions about the impacts of future climate change on water resources. Looking at the region’s current water crisis from the perspective of its climate history, the authors ask the central question of what is “normal” climate for the West, and whether the relatively benign climate of the past century will continue into the future. The West without Water merges climate and paleoclimate research from a wide variety of sources as it introduces readers to key discoveries in cracking the secrets of the region’s climatic past. It demonstrates that extended droughts and catastrophic floods have plagued the West with regularity over the past two millennia and recounts the most disastrous flood in the history of California and the West, which occurred in 1861–62. The authors show that, while the West may have temporarily buffered itself from such harsh climatic swings by creating artificial environments and human landscapes, our modern civilization may be ill-prepared for the future climate changes that are predicted to beset the region. They warn that it is time to face the realities of the past and prepare for a future in which fresh water may be less reliable.

These essays on California’ s economy, culture, and literature between the 1880s and 1920s show how rural places were made over in the image of capital. The story told here is of the real and imaginary spaces that capital occupied, including its encounters with the realities and representations of race, gender, and class. Beginning with the geography and political economy of agrarian capitalism, Henderson moves on to examine the celebratory, if fretful, ruminations on economy in novels by Frank Norris, Mary Austin, and many other writers drawn to rural California before John Steinbeck redefined the scene in the 1930s.

In late October 1846, the last wagon train of that year's westward migration stopped overnight before resuming its arduous climb over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, unaware that a fearsome storm was gathering force. After months of grueling travel, the 81 men, women and children would be trapped for a brutal winter with little food and only primitive shelter. The conclusion is known: by spring of the next year, the Donner Party was synonymous with the most harrowing extremes of human survival. But until now, the full story of what happened, what it tells us about human nature and about America's westward expansion, remained shrouded in myth. Drawing on fresh archaeological evidence, recent research on topics ranging from survival rates to snowfall totals, and heartbreaking letters and diaries made public by descendants a century-and-a-half after the tragedy, Ethan Rarick offers an intimate portrait of the Donner party and their unimaginable ordeal: a mother who must divide her family, a little girl who shines with courage, a devoted wife who refuses to abandon her husband, a man who risks his life merely to keep his word. But Rarick resists both the gruesomely sensationalist accounts of the Donner party as well as later attempts to turn the survivors into archetypal pioneer heroes. \"The Donner Party,\" Rarick writes, \"is a story of hard decisions that were neither heroic nor villainous. Often, the emigrants displayed a more realistic and typically human mixture of generosity and selfishness, an alloy born of necessity.\" A fast-paced, heart-wrenching, clear-eyed narrative history, A Desperate Hope casts new light on one of America's most horrific encounters between the dream of a better life and the harsh realities such dreams so often must confront.

Alive with the exuberance, contradictions, and variety of the Golden State, this Depression-era guide to California is more than 700 pages of information that is, as David Kipen writes in his spirited introduction, \"anecdotal, opinionated, and altogether habit-forming.\" Describing the history, culture, and roadside attractions of the 1930s, the WPA Guide to California features some of the very best anonymous literature of its era, with writing by luminaries such as San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, composer-writer- hobo Harry Partch, and authors Tillie Olsen and Kenneth Patchen.

This collected volume of original essays proposes to address the state of scholarship on the political, cultural, and intellectual history of Americans responses to wilderness from first contact to the present. While not bringing a synthetic narrative to wilderness, the volume will gather competing interpretations of wilderness in historical context.

Refusing the Favor tells the little-known story of the Spanish-Mexican women who saw their homeland become part of New Mexico. A corrective to traditional narratives of the period, it carefully and lucidly documents the effects of colonization, looking closely at how the women lived both before and after the United States took control of the region. Focusing on Santa Fe, which was long one of the largest cities west of the Mississippi, Deena González demonstrates that women's responses to the conquest were remarkably diverse and that their efforts to preserve their culture were complex and long-lasting. Drawing on a range of sources, from newspapers to wills, deeds, and court records, González shows that the change to U.S. territorial status did little to enrich or empower the Spanish-Mexican inhabitants. The vast majority, in fact, found themselves quickly impoverished, and this trend toward low-paid labor, particularly for women, continues even today. González both examines the long-term consequences of colonization and draws illuminating parallels with the experiences of other minorities. Refusing the Favor also describes how and why Spanish-Mexican women have remained invisible in the histories of the region for so long. It avoids casting the story as simply \"bad\" Euro-American migrants and \"good\" local people by emphasizing the concrete details of how women lived. It covers every aspect of their experience, from their roles as businesswomen to the effects of intermarriage, and it provides an essential key to the history of New Mexico. Anyone with an interest in Western history, gender studies, Chicano/a studies, or the history of borderlands and colonization will find the book an invaluable resource and guide.

Compared with many of her Spanish-Mexican relatives and friends, Manuela Baca was a wealthy woman. She owned several properties in and around Santa Fe. With her husband, the well-known Miguel Sena, she controlled an indeterminable, but large, portion of Santa Fe’s developing merchant economy. The partners owned three homes and pasture outside the town; they were active in the trading market between Missouri and Chihuahua, Mexico, which had made Santa Fe its nucleus. Sena made his money by buying property with cash raised from selling livestock, trading with the surrounding Indian communities, and operating a mercantile store in town. Despite her up- per-middle-class position, however, Baca’s life was far from idyllic. From April 6 through September 13, 1832, she appeared in court on several occasions to answer charges brought against her by a Euro-American merchant, Alexander (or Alejandro, as he was referred to in the court documents) Le Grand. During that period, her wealth or status provided her little consolation and, indeed, was the source of her vexing troubles.

This work revolves around a simple question that is posed by New Mexican history: How did the lives of the women of Santa Fe change when the United States colonized the former Mexican North? This seemingly straight- forward query led to several discoveries about the way Spanish-Mexican women lived during the past century, about what they valued and believed, and about how they reconstructed their daily routines after they were besieged bystrangers from the United States.