| View Larger Image | Lands of Promise and Despair: Chronicles of Early California, 1535-1846 (California Legacy Book) | Paperbackby Rose Marie Beebe (Author), Robert M. Senkewicz (Author)
| List Price: | $21.95 | | Price: | $16.46 | | You Save: | $5.49 (25%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Heyday Books | | Page Count: | 544 Pages | | Publication Date: | November 01, 2001 | | Sales Rank: | 300,989th |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Spanish and Mexican California is generally depicted through the journals of sea captains and other visitors. This groundbreaking collection offers another perspective: early California seen through the eyes of those who explored it, colonized it, and settled it in the age before the gold rush. Over sixty selections from letters, journals, official reports and proclamations, interrogations, and interviews--many presented in English for the first time--lay before us a surprisingly varied and dynamic portrait of an era generally dismissed as static, pastoral, or backward. Conflicts between missionaries and soldiers, Indians and non-Indians, Hispanic settlers and Anglo newcomers, friends and neighbors, spill out of the pages, bringing the ferment of daily life into sharp focus. Here we find not sleepy towns, quaint missions, or comic opera military outposts, but rather an ever-shifting world of struggle and opportunity, aspiration and tragedy, pride and loss. The first-person accounts are tied together with extensive introductions and commentaries by two well-known scholars, giving us an intimate portrait and placing the exploration and settlement of Alta California within the history of Baja California and the conquest of the New World. This ambitious and accessible book, with more than thirty illustrations, maps, and paintings, will influence greatly how we envision the history and legacy of Hispanic California and is sure to become the cornerstone for a new generation of early California studies. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 2 reviews)
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Fascinating & Unique by James V. Sylvester (Austin, TX)  5 Stars
June 26, 2007
Stashed away in the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, in the Huntington Library in San Marino, and in a dozen other places are the original letters, diaries, reports, articles, and other accounts of Spanish and Mexican California. Such primary documents are simply inaccessible to the lay reader.
However, what Rose Marie Bebe and Robert Senkewicz -- both professors at Santa Clara University -- have done is to select various primary materials, draw excerpts, translate them to English, and then add introductory commentary to set each item in its historical context. The result provides a direct view into California's Spanish and Mexican heritage through the words of those who lived those times.
While each selection covers no more than a few pages, here are passages from Colombus, de las Casas, Cortes, Cabrillo, Vizcaino, Portola, Serra, Fages, Osio, Pico and many others whose names may be familiar from general surveys of California history. Also included, where possible, are accounts from the indigenous people and a selection from the Russians who hunted for furs along the northern coast. Of particular interest is "1785: Trials of a Frontier Woman" which contains a petition from Dona Callis in protest against her husband.
The compact disposition of each document allows for two advantages: the text never drags and the book is able to cover a comprehensive range of topics (more than seventy original documents are presented). This is a marvelous reader of carefully edited materials. The authors have done the hard work; their scholarship is for us to enjoy.
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Good introduction to early California history by mrliteral  4 Stars
July 02, 2002
This book covers the era when California (also known as Alta California) was a possession of Spain and Mexico. It is essentially a collection of first hand accounts from various people of this era.Since most, if not all, of these accounts were originally in Spanish, they require translation, and that is the book's one weakness: almost all the accounts read like they were written by the same person; some of the character of the individual writers is lost.Nonetheless, this is a good book, both readable and fast-moving. It is interesting that while we know a lot about the Revolutionary era and the founding of the United States, the topics in this book - which take place on the same continent at around the same time - are almost unknown. That, in itself, makes this book a good read.
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