#Long forgotten fields dreamscape free

west of the Mississippi, printed more newspapers than London, and popped seven bottles of champagne for each one opened in Boston, thanks to North America’s highest per capita income. “Of all the marvelous phases of the Present,” the poet Bayard Taylor wrote, “San Francisco will most tax the belief of the Future,” as it “seemed to have accomplished in a day the growth of half a century.” In the 1850s, McWilliams wrote, the city published more books than the rest of the U.S. And in its earliest years, the city was more closely connected to the Pacific Rim than to the East Coast establishment, permitting it to enter the global stage on its own terms. The Gold Rush made San Francisco a global capital. California, the social scientist Davis McEntire observed, meant to America what America meant to the rest of the world. Read: The geography of the American dreamīy 1850, when California entered the union with a constitution that banned slave labor by consensus, the features that would define the state were already established: It attracted a wildly diverse population and offered everyone save its Native tribes unprecedented opportunity, if not yet equal rights. Burnett, who soon became the state’s first governor.

“We have here in our midst a mixed mass of human beings from every part of the wide earth, of different habits, manners, customs, and opinions, all, however, impelled onward by the same feverish desire of fortune-making,” wrote Peter H.

#Long forgotten fields dreamscape free

Northern and southern whites mingled with free Blacks, runaway slaves, newly naturalized immigrants, and foreign dreamers from the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe. That find sparked the Gold Rush and then a mass migration that transformed the Pacific Rim. McWilliams’s tale begins on the eve of statehood with the discovery of gold on a river near the western slopes of the Sierras. Published in 1949, just ahead of the state’s centennial, it told the story of California’s rise from a sparsely populated Spanish territory to a world-altering force. The writer Carey McWilliams captured that promise in California: The Great Exception, the definitive celebration of California’s founding myth-the way the Golden State long preferred to understand itself. Instead, they are poised to take the California Dream to their graves by betraying a promise the state has offered from the start. The generations that reaped the benefits of the postwar era in what was the most dynamic place in the world should be striving to ensure that future generations can pursue happiness as they did.

Millions still immigrate to my beloved home to improve both their prospects and ours. This landscape is bejeweled with engineering feats: the California Aqueduct the Golden Gate Bridge and the ribbon of Pacific Coast Highway that stretches south of Monterey, clings to the cliffs of Big Sur, and descends the kelp-strewn Central Coast, where William Hearst built his Xanadu on a hillside where his zebras still graze. If I close my eyes I can see silhouettes of Joshua trees against a desert sunrise seals playing in La Jolla’s craggy coves of sun-spangled, emerald seawater fog rolling over the rugged Sonoma County coast at sunset into primeval groves of redwoods that John Steinbeck called “ambassadors from another time.” Behold California, colossus of the West Coast: the most populous American state the world’s fifth-largest economy and arguably the most culturally influential, exporting Google searches and Instagram feeds and iPhones and Teslas and Netflix Originals and kimchi quesadillas.