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California gold rush aconomic and culture
California gold rush and its impact
California gold rush and its impact
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Linda Gordon gives a micro-history of the 1904 orphan kidnapping incident which happened in the Arizona mining town Clifton/Morenci. A historian at NYU, Linda uses her background as a historian of women and feminism to address nationalism, race, and identity on the frontier in The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. Gordon focuses on race relations and their construction between the “Mexican and Anglo” inhabitants. In her argument locals created racial polarization between Anglos and Mexicans based on economics which helped produce perceived binaries. The book is organized very uniquely.
Chapter 1 establishes the epic context and tone for the entire novel. This brief, but important, opening chapter provides a backdrop for the main events of the narrative, describing the event primarily responsible for spurring the great migration to California during the 1930s. The destructive force of the Dust Bowl is staggeringly described as a backward life cycle, a regression from fertile green to a dead and dusty brown. The deterioration of the land that forces the farmers to huddle and "figger" foreshadows the plight of the Joads: Forced off their land by a bank looking for profit, they will move west seeking a new livelihood.
The novel, The Day the Cowboys Quit, by Elmer Kelton is not a typical cowboy story filled with waving guns and violent fights. Instead, this story shows what the real life of a cowboy would have been like through the story of Hugh Hitchcock. The Day the Cowboys Quit is based on a cowboy strike that occurred in Tascosa, Texas in 1883. Kelton based his fictional story on the causes of the strike and what became as a result of the strike. This paper will explain historical events concerning the cowboys and depict their true lifestyle which contrasts the stereotypes normally associated with being a cowboy, as well as summarize the novel The Day the Cowboys Quit.
Name: Joshua Shou Mrs. Farley, Mr. Kennedy Humanities 9 Niemoller November 16th The Effect of Harsh Environment, The Role of Women, and Economical Trade on the Klondike Gold Rush. Have you ever heard of something and thought something was too good to be true, and then you realize it was a fraud all along? The Klondike Gold Rush caused a similar reaction, as over 90,000 prospectors left their jobs and homes to journey into the Klondike in search of Gold to end up empty-handed. During their journey, they had to cope with extreme harsh conditions through Alaska as well as interact and trade with the natives.
During the 1930’s thousands of Dust Bowl migrant workers made their way from the central plain into California seeking work. In their search for work and some form of income many of the migrants and their families ended up in Hoovervilles, which were makeshift roadside camps that were greatly impoverished. Steinbeck was able to travel through the labor camps and recorded the horrible living conditions of the migrant workers. The collection of these recordings was published as Harvest Gypsies. During the tours of the labor camps he saw the oppression of the workers first hand in addition to workers being demoralized by wealthy land owners.
Marsha P. Johnson was a Black actress, drag queen, sex worker, and trans woman who lived from June 27, 1944 to July 6, 1992 (Born; Parker; Pay It No Mind). She is best remembered for being at the center of the 1969 Stonewall Riots (Tungol). In fact, some claim that she started these riots on June 28, 1969 after racist and homophobic police officers raided The Stonewall Inn, a known gay club in New York City’s Greenwich Village (Born; Gossett). Additionally, with the support of Sylvia Rivera, who she was mentoring at the time, she founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in 1970, which provided a safe space for homeless transgender teens and drag queens and advocated for the inclusion of transgender rights in the gay rights
As a result, from 1860 to 1900 alone, the number of urban areas in the United States expanded fivefold (Source 2). The immigrants who desperately needed employment and the greed of factory owners made the rise of sweat shops astonishing. Around the country low-paid immigrants, including women and children, worked for excessively long
Knight, authors of “Appeal from California. The Chinese Invasion. Workingman’s Address.” , argue for the Chinese exclusion. They discuss in a scholarly way that these Chinese that are flooding in do not have much, and were often treated as slaves.
Miners stayed in California, either out of fear and shame of coming back home empty-handed, or out of greed to seek for more gold (Rohrbaugh, 1997, para.16). Rohrbaugh gave the example of a forty-niner who decided not to return home until he brings something with him (Rohrbaugh, 1997,para.16). For the miners’ families, failing to come home with nothing would be both an emotional and a financial issue (Rohrbaugh, 1997, para.17). The decision of returning home turned out to be very complicated. As Rohrbaugh (1997) described, the miners could reward their families by going home, but yet, the issue was more complicated than it appeared.
In Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California, Tomas Almaguer (2009) describes how race and racism coincides to facilitate the birth of white supremacy in California during the late nineteenth century. The idea of racial formation allowed groups to establish their power and privilege over defined racial lines. For each of the three racialized groups presented Chapter one combines the historical and sociological framework to describe the transformation of Mexican California. Through highlighting the historical accounts of racialized groups, fear of potential threats to white workers creates white supremacy. He continues by describing the peopling of Anglo-CA from 1848-1900 with the immigration of Irish, German,
Barabara Simila’s “Company Locations” paints a picture of living on a mining site. She paints a grim picture of the scene as whole, pinning the miners as boring workers going about a monotonous routine. To better organize the scene she describes in the poem, we can separate how the mining locations are sites of change, contingency, and complexity. One way that Simila illustrates the mining companies is with the reference to the community that most mines built for their workers.
The gold rush in California further complicated the issue of slavery. When gold
Characteristically, the settlement of American land was established almost exclusively by men, especially those of European decent. Therefore, after the Louisiana purchase -- and the consequential doubling in size of the continental United States -- the western half of the country begged to be explored and settled, a job that many believed lay in the hands of the white man. Despite the “White Man’s West” that lay readily ahead of them, many potential settlers were hesitant to travel to the newly claimed land. It wasn’t until the combination of both the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the Homestead Act of 1862, alongside the construction of complex railway systems, that a mass migration from the east coast began to occur; unsurprisingly, the majority of the demographic were indeed male. Throughout several years of work in rudimentary frontier towns and countless attempts to modernize the vast expanse of land the settlers had received, the living conditions of the Wild West remained harsh, any endeavor to provide comfort collapsed, and frankly the men west of the Mississippi River became desperate for the presence and attention of their female
After President Polk confirmed the rumors of gold in California in 1848 (Oakland Museum Staff), around 250,000 people came to California in seek of the soft metal that could lead to a fortune: gold (The forty-niners). The California Gold Rush not only presented fortune, it presented a new idea of the American Dream: “‘one where the emphasis was on the ability to take risks and the willingness to gamble
As the transportation to different parts of the world became more accessible, workers from countries that do not demand much labour started to move to other countries like the United States. From 1860 to prior to World War 1 is reckoned to be the age of mass migration. The United States imported a significant amount of workers from the “Old World” as Western Europe, where it was not as developed compared to other European countries. The other reason behind is through the mobilization of labour from decreased demand of workers in the agriculture. Moreover, many of the immigrants were young, poor, and unskilled workers who had greater opportunity cost to leave their country.
