Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping of California - Softcover

Wyatt, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195127412 ISBN 13: 9780195127416

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1999

Synopsis

In this wholly original study, David Wyatt uses the metaphor of fire to tell the story of California. Wyatt focuses this catastrophic history of his native state on five events of social combustion and tangible fire that swept through California, altering its physical and political landscape and the way both were represented in art and literature.
Wyatt begins with the accidental importation and spread of the wild oat in the 1770s, a process that had its human parallel in the Spanish invaders. He then explores the impact of four other significant events: the Gold Rush, the 1906 earthquake and fire, the post-World War II defense-industry boom, and the fire of race that erupted in Watts in 1965. This fifth fire, which flared throughout the Chinese and Mexican immigration experiences and the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, has been at the core of California's history, Wyatt argues.
From the journals of a Gold Camp mineress to Amy Tan's novels, from Ansel Adams's photography to Roman Polanski's films, Wyatt brings into dialogue a wide range of powerful, moving voices.

About this title

Review:

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.

About the Author:

David Wyatt is a professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park. He is the author of The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California and Out of the Sixties: Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0195127412
• ISBN 13: 9780195127416
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304