Lands of Promise and Despair: Chronicles of Early California, 1535-1846 (California Legacy Book) - Softcover

Rose Marie Beebe; Robert M. Senkewicz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1890771481 ISBN 13: 9781890771485

Publisher: Heyday, 2001

Synopsis

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 newly translated and some 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.

The first-person accounts are tied together with extensive introductions and commentaries by two well-known scholars. Together the selections and commentaries give us an intimate portrait as well as a broad context, placing the exploration and settlement of Alta California within the history of Baja California and the conquest of the New World.

About this title

About the Author:

Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz teach Spanish and history, respectively, at Santa Clara University. They translated and edited The History of Alta California by Antonio Maria Osio and have written a number of essays on Spanish and Mexican California. Rose Marie is the president of the California Mission Studies Association. They live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

From Publishers Weekly:

"On the right-hand side of the Indies there was an island called California, which was very close to the region of the Earthly Paradise." So reads a 1510 Spanish novel about a mythic land populated only by women; by the time Cervantes published Don Quixote some 100 years later, California "had evolved from an imagined to a real place," write editors Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz. In Lands of Promise and Despair: Chronicles of Early California, 1535-1846, the editors gather together an impressive collection of primary documents the writings of early California settlers, primarily, many of whom were Spanish or Mexican to provide a rich early history of the region and the lives and the culture of the people who resided there. Illus.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Heyday
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1890771481
• ISBN 13: 9781890771485
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 506