Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping of California Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping of California Book

David Wyatt offers a far-seeing account of California history, shaped by a complex of catastrophes--ethnic clashes, ecological conquests, fires, and earthquakes--that are replayed even today. He writes of politicians who founded their careers on ideas of purity and exclusion, of immigrants who arrived seeking to remake themselves in a strange new world just as they do today, often returning to themes of cultural collision. (Witness the Rodney King riots and the O. J. Simpson trial.) Wyatt draws on dozens of overlooked sources--most notably the memoir of the Native American 18th-century chronicler Pablo Tac and the diaries of Chinese, Japanese, African American, and Hispanic immigrants--to craft a remarkable, sobering story.Read More

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  • Product Description

    Using his background in cultural history and literature, David Wyatt focuses this history of his native state on five events that swept through California, altering its physical and political landscape and the way both were represented in art and literature. Beginning with the accidental importation of the Spanish wild oat in the 1970's, the book goes on to explore the impact of the Gold Rush, the 1906 earthquake and fire, the post-World War II economic boom, and the "fire of race" that erupted in Watts in 1965 and still burns today.

  • 0201144794
  • 9780201144796
  • David Wyatt
  • 1 April 1999
  • Da Capo Press Inc
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 304
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