Synopses & Reviews
California during the gold rush was a place of disputed claims, shoot-outs, gambling halls, and prostitution; a place populated by that rough and rebellious figure, the forty-niner; in short, a place that seems utterly unconnected to middle-class culture. In
American Alchemy, however, Brian Roberts offers a surprising challenge to this assumption.
Roberts points to a long-neglected truth of the gold rush: many of the northeastern forty-niners who ventured westward were in fact middle-class in origin, status, and values. Tracing the experiences and adventures both of these men and of the "unseen" forty-ninerswomen who stayed back East while their husbands went out Westhe shows that, whatever else the gold seekers abandoned on the road to California, they did not simply turn their backs on middle-class culture.
Ultimately, Roberts argues, the story told here reveals an overlooked chapter in the history of the formation of the middle class. While the acquisition of respectability reflects one stage in this history, he says, the gold rush constitutes a second stagea rebellion against standards of respectability.
Review
A welcome addition to work on the California gold rush and on nineteenth-century white, middle-class culture.
Journal of American History
Review
Offers a fresh look at a familiar episode in U.S. history.
Journal of the Early Republic
Review
An important book, convincingly relocating the opening cultural crisis of the American middle class.
Harvard Business History Review
Review
[This book] achieves a "gold standard" by making something as familiar as the Gold Rush uncomfortably new.
American Historical Review
Review
An important work within the context of gold rush studies.
Enterprise and Society
Synopsis
A colorful investigation of the California Gold Rush that overturns the myth of the rebellious Forty-niner and reveals the middle-class values and origins of those who travelled west to seek adventure and fortune.
About the Author
Brian Roberts is assistant professor of history at California State University in Sacramento.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. California Gold and Filthy Lucre
Chapter 2. Gold Fever as a Cure
Chapter 3. Husbands and Wives
Chapter 4. Numberless Highways to Fairy Grottos
Chapter 5. A Great and Perverse Paradise
Chapter 6. California Is a Humbug
Chapter 7. Widows and Helpmates
Chapter 8. A Wild, Free, Disorderly, Grotesque Society
Chapter 9. The Prude Fails
Chapter 10. The End of the Flush Times
Conclusion
Notes
Index
A section of illustrations follows.