Books by "Richard J. Orsi"
5 books found
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize "A powerful book, crowded with telling details and shrewd observations." —Michael Kazin, New York Times Book Review The transcontinental railroads were the first corporate behemoths. Their attempts to generate profits from proliferating debt sparked devastating economic panics. Their dependence on public largesse drew them into the corridors of power, initiating new forms of corruption. Their operations rearranged space and time, remade the landscape of the West, and opened new ways of life and work. Their discriminatory rates sparked a new antimonopoly politics. The transcontinentals were pivotal actors in the making of modern America, but the triumphal myths of the golden spike, Robber Barons larger than life, and an innovative capitalism all die here. Instead we have a new vision of the Gilded Age, often darkly funny, that shows history to be rooted in failure as well as success.
Winner of the 2021 California Book Award (Californiana category) A brilliant California history, in word and image, from an award-winning historian and a documentary photographer. “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.
The newest volume in the Oxford History of the United States series, The Republic for Which It Stands argues that the Gilded Age, along with Reconstruction--its conflicts, rapid and disorienting change, hopes and fears--formed the template of American modernity.
Quotable San Francisco: Historic Moments in Memorable Words
by Terry Hamburg and Richard Hansen
2021 · Arcadia Publishing
San Francisco surged from hamlet to boomtown overnight--the most meteoric instant city in history. From the Gold Rush to the Tech Rush, it's been the site of daring innovations, counterculture upheavals and social rebellions that shaped generations. Over the decades, residents have offered unique perspectives through journals, letters and newspapers, their words bringing another time to life. Discover San Francisco through the eyes of miners and ladies of the night. Relive the experiences of robber barons and beatniks who flourished in a tiny corner of the world with fewer than one million souls. With commentary, background and extraordinary images, historians Terry Hamburg and Richard Hansen guide you through these colorful quotes, showing the city as it once was and what it aspired to be.
In 1865, Wild Bill Hickok killed Dave Tutt in a Missouri public square in the West's first notable "walkdown." One hundred and twenty-nine years later, Bernhard Goetz shot four threatening young men in a New York subway car. Apart from gunfire, what could the two events possibly have in common? Goetz, writes Richard Maxwell Brown, was acquitted of wrongdoing in the spirit of a uniquely American view of self-defense, a view forged in frontier gunfights like Hickok's. When faced with a deadly threat, we have the right to stand our ground and fight. We have no duty to retreat. No Duty to Retreat offers an engrossing account of how this idea of self-defense emerged, focusing in particular on the gunfights of the frontier and their impact on our legal traditions. The right to stand one's ground, Brown tells us, appeared relatively recently. Under English common law, the threatened party had a legal duty to retreat "to the wall" before fighting back. But from the nineteenth century on, such authorities as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes rejected this doctrine as unsuited to both the American mind and the age of firearms. Brown sketches the influence of frontier violence, demonstrating the tremendous impact of the famous gunmen and the prevalence of what he calls "grassroots gunfighters"--unsung men who resorted to their guns at a moment's notice. These duels, ambushes, and firefights, he writes, were more than personal vendettas: They were part of a "Western Civil War of Incorporation," pitting gunmen--usually Republicans and Unionists, who sided with the expanding banks, railroads, and businesses--against cowboys and independent farmers, who were often Democrats sympathizing with the Confederacy. Brown examines the gunfight near the O.K. Corral in this light, showing how it was a climax of tensions between Tombstone's Republican businessmen (represented by Wyatt Earp) and the county's cowboys (led by the Clantons and McLaurys). He also looks at such lesser-known battles as the Mussel Slough war, in which resisting farmers, imbued with the no-retreat ethic, fought for their independent lifestyle against encroaching rail barons. This Civil War of Incorporation fed the violence of the West and reinforced the legal doctrine of "no duty to retreat." The frontier days are long past, but Brown shows how the ethic of no retreat continues to shape everything from our entertainment to our foreign policy (including President Bush's "line drawn in the sand") to our politics to cases like that of Bernhard Goetz. Though challenged as never before by the values of peace and social activism, it remains a central theme in American thought and character.