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California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History
Contributor(s): White, Richard (Author), White, Jesse Amble (Photographer)
ISBN: 0393243060     ISBN-13: 9780393243062
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
OUR PRICE:   $40.50  
Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats
Published: March 2020
Qty:
Temporarily out of stock - Will ship within 2 to 5 weeks
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- History | United States - State & Local - West (ak, Ca, Co, Hi, Id, Mt, Nv, Ut, Wy)
- Photography | Subjects & Themes - Regional (see Also Travel - Pictorials)
- Travel | Pictorials (see Also Photography - Subjects & Themes - Regional)
Dewey: 979.4
LCCN: 2019032319
Physical Information: 1" H x 8.3" W x 10.4" (2.90 lbs) 352 pages
Themes:
- Cultural Region - Western U.S.
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:

"This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." This indelible quote from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance applies especially well to California, where legend has so thoroughly become fact that it is visible in everyday landscapes. Our foremost historian of the West, Richard White, never content to "print the legend," collaborates here with his son, a talented photographer, in excavating the layers of legend built into California's landscapes. Together they expose the bedrock of the past, and the history they uncover is astonishing.

Jesse White's evocative photographs illustrate the sites of Richard's historical investigations. A vista of Drakes Estero conjures the darkly amusing story of the Drake Navigators Guild and its dubious efforts to establish an Anglo-Saxon heritage for California. The restored Spanish missions of Los Angeles frame another origin story in which California's native inhabitants, civilized through contact with friars, gift their territories to white settlers. But the history is not so placid. A quiet riverside park in the Tulare Lake Basin belies scenes of horror from when settlers in the 1850s transformed native homelands into American property. Near the lake bed stands a small marker commemorating the Mussel Slough massacre, the culmination of a violent struggle over land titles between local farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1870s. Tulare is today a fertile agricultural county, but its population is poor and unhealthy. The California Dream lives elsewhere. The lake itself disappeared when tributary rivers were rerouted to deliver government-subsidized water to big agriculture and cities. But climate change ensures that it will be back--the only question is when.


Contributor Bio(s): White, Richard: - Richard White is the Margaret Byrne Professor Emeritus of American History at Stanford University. He is the author of many acclaimed books in American western and environmental history, including Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Parkman Prize, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.White, Jesse Amble: - Jesse Amble White is a landscape and documentary photographer.