American Alchemy

by Roberts, Brian

• ISBN13: 9780807825433
• ISBN10: 0807825433
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-05-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

California during the gold rush was a place of disputed claims, shoot-outs, gambling halls, and prostitution; a place populated by that rough and rebellious figure, the forty-niner; in short, a place that seems utterly unconnected to middle-class culture. In American Alchemy, however, Brian Roberts offers a surprising challenge to this assumption. Roberts points to a long-neglected truth of the gold rush: many of the northeastern forty-niners who ventured westward were in fact middle-class in origin, status, and values. Tracing the experiences and adventures both of these men and of the "unseen" forty-niners--women who stayed back East while their husbands went out West--he shows that, whatever else the gold seekers abandoned on the road to California, they did not simply turn their backs on middle-class culture. Ultimately, Roberts argues, the story told here reveals an overlooked chapter in the history of the formation of the middle class. While the acquisition of respectability reflects one stage in this history, he says, the gold rush constitutes a second stage--a rebellion against standards of respectability.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(16)
California Gold and Filthy Lucre	17	(26)
Gold Fever as a Cure	43	(26)
Husbands and Wives	69	(24)
Numberless Highways to Fairy Grottos	93	(26)
A Great and Perverse Paradise	119	(24)
California Is a Humbug	143	(26)
Widows and Helpmates	169	(28)
A Wild, Free, Disorderly, Grotesque Society	197	(24)
The Prude Fails	221	(22)
The End of the Flush Times	243	(26)
Conclusion	269	(8)
Notes	277	(44)
Index	321