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California’s early history was both colorful and turbulent. After Europeans first explored the region in the sixteenth century, it was conquered and colonized by successive waves of adventurers and settlers. In Contest for California, award-winning author Stephen G. Hyslop draws on a wide array of primary sources to weave an elegant narrative of this epic struggle for control of the territory that many saw as a beautiful, sprawling land of promise. In vivid detail, Hyslop traces the story of early California from its founding in 1769 by Spanish colonists to its annexation in 1848 by the United States. He describes the motivations and activities of colonizers and colonized alike. Using eyewitness accounts, he allows all participants—Native American, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American—to have their say. Soldiers, settlers, missionaries, and merchants testify to the heroic and commonplace, the colorful and tragic, in California’s pre-American history. Even as he acknowledges the dark side of this story, Hyslop avoids a simplistic perspective. Moving beyond the polarities that have marked late-twentieth-century California historiography, he offers nuanced portraits of such controversial figures as Junípero Serra and treats the Californios and their distinctive Hispanic culture with a respect lacking in earlier histories. Attentive to tensions within the invading groups—priests and the military during the Spanish era, merchants and settlers during the American era—he also never loses sight of their impact on the original inhabitants of the region: California’s Native peoples. He also recounts the journeys of colonists from Russia, England, and other countries who influenced the development of California as it passed from the hands of Spaniards and Mexicans to Americans. Exhaustively researched yet concise, this book offers a much-needed alternative history of early California and its evolution from Spanish colony to American territory.
Between 1769 and 1834, an influx of Spanish, Russian, and then American colonists streamed into Alta California seeking new opportunities. Their arrival brought the imposition of foreign beliefs, practices, and constraints on Indigenous peoples. Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California reorients understandings of this dynamic period, which challenged both Native and non-Native people to reimagine communities not only in different places and spaces but also in novel forms and practices. The contributors draw on archaeological and historical archival sources to analyze the generative processes and nature of communities of belonging in the face of rapid demographic change and perceived or enforced difference. Contributors provide important historical background on the effects that colonialism, missions, and lives lived beyond mission walls had on Indigenous settlement, marriage patterns, trade, and interactions. They also show the agency with which Indigenous peoples make their own decisions as they construct and reconstruct their communities. With nine different case studies and an insightful epilogue, this book offers analyses that can be applied broadly across the Americas, deepening our understanding of colonialism and community. Contributors: Julienne Bernard James F. Brooks John Dietler Stella D’Oro John G. Douglass John Ellison Glenn Farris Heather Gibson Kathleen L. Hull Linda Hylkema John R. Johnson Kent G. Lightfoot Lee M. Panich Sarah Peelo Seetha N. Reddy David W. Robinson Tsim D. Schneider Christina Spellman Benjamin Vargas
In the nineteenth century, the colonial territories of California and Hawai'i underwent important cultural, economic, and ecological transformations influenced by an unlikely factor: cows. The creation of native cattle cultures, represented by the Indian vaquero and the Hawaiian paniolo, demonstrates that California Indians and native Hawaiians adapted in ways that allowed them to harvest the opportunities for wealth that these unfamiliar biological resources presented. But the imposition of new property laws limited these indigenous responses, and Pacific cattle frontiers ultimately became the driving force behind Euro-American political and commercial domination, under which native residents lost land and sovereignty and faced demographic collapse. Environmental historians have too often overlooked California and Hawai'i, despite the roles the regions played in the colonial ranching frontiers of the Pacific World. In Cattle Colonialism, John Ryan Fischer significantly enlarges the scope of the American West by examining the trans-Pacific transformations these animals wrought on local landscapes and native economies.
Unique in California history—and beloved by visitors and residents alike—the city of Santa Barbara boasts three great historical properties: the Mission, the Courthouse, and the Presidio. Least known is the Presidio. This book fills this vacuum, beginning with the story of its adobe construction between 1784 and 1790. This itself was preceded by the construction of three other Spanish forts: Monterey (1770), San Diego (1773), and San Francisco (1776). All four Presidios helped secure the Spanish settlement of Alta or Upper California, as the mixed-racial soldiers and their families became the first Spanish settlers of the region. The Santa Barbara Presidio was the last Spanish fort founded and built not only in California, but in all of Spanish North America, an area that, in its day, covered much of the southern portion of the modern United States from Florida to California. This book celebrates the Santa Barbara Presidio’s place in not only American history but also that of Spain, and honors the community that came together to ensure its preservation and faithful reconstruction.
A native of northern Russia, Alexander Baranov was a middle-aged merchant trader with no prior experience in the fur trade when, in 1790, he arrived in North America to assume command over Russia’s highly profitable sea otter business. With the title of chief manager, he strengthened his leadership role after the formation of the Russian American Company in 1799. An adventuresome, dynamic, and charismatic leader, he proved to be something of a commercial genius in Alaska, making huge profits for company partners and shareholders in Irkutsk and St. Petersburg while receiving scandalously little support from the homeland. Baranov receives long overdue attention in Kenneth Owens’s Empire Maker, the first scholarly biography of Russian America’s virtual imperial viceroy. His eventful life included shipwrecks, battles with Native forces, clashes with rival traders and Russian Orthodox missionaries, and an enduring marriage to a Kodiak Alutiiq woman with whom he had two children. In the process, the book reveals maritime Alaska and northern California during the Baranov era as fascinating cultural borderlands, where Russian, English, Spanish, and New England Yankee traders and indigenous peoples formed complex commercial, political, and domestic relationships that continue to influence these regions today.
The development of the Russian state was marked by a steady growth of population and especially territory. Its colonial expansion was mainly an eastward movement in search of profitable resources, the way west being blocked by other European powers and the way south by other empires (Ottoman and Chinese). The push to the east proceeded rapidly and distantly, being eased not only by the absence of foreign opposition and native disunity but also by Siberia's interwoven river network and the North Pacific's convenient causeway of the Aleutian chain, plus the lure of 'soft gold' (furs) in the form of Siberian sables and Pacific sea otters.
Few states of the United States have a more varied, a more interesting or a more instructive history than California, and few have done so little to preserve their history. In narrating the story of California, the author has endeavored to deal justly with the different eras and episodes of its history; to state facts; to tell the truth without favoritism or prejudice; to give credit where credit is due and censure where it is deserved. This accounts also for the prominence of Los Angeles in the second half of this volume. The consolidation of Los Angeles city and the cities of Wilmington, San Pedro and Hollywood has merged the history of these three into that of the Greater Los Angeles. The early history of these cities is given separately up to their consolidation. All over this book is a real treasure chest and every single of its more than 400 pages is a must-read for the people of California and Los Angeles County.