Bear Flag

From the Indians who inhabited the land before the first Europeans saw it through the warfare that would finally leave the province in American hands, this book, by the author of "Legends and Lies", traces the history of California.

Poetry. BEAR FLAG REPUBLIC features poems from ninety poets, including Killarney Clary, Wanda Coleman, Peter Everwine, Richard Garcia, Amy Gerstler, Robert Hass, Eloise Klein Healy, Jane Hirshfield, Garrett Hongo, Mark Jarman, Dorianne Laux, Philip Levine, Larry Levis, Morton Marcus, Czeslaw Milosz, Luis Omar Salinas, David St. John, Joseph Stroud, Amy Uyematsu, Diane Wakoski, Charles Wright, and Al Young, among many others. This great anthology also includes twenty-two essays from poets, including Robert Bly, Maxine Chernoff, Mark Jarman, Diane Wakoski, Charles Harper Webb, and more. "Speaking is natural; writing is not. Prose and poetry will forever combine and recombine to express what utterly needs to be told"--Al Young. "A prose poem has the shape of water; it spreads out. Some poems are that expansive, that open and fluid, and their shape needs to reflect their nature..."--Marsha de la O.

The Second Massachusetts Cavalry included the only organized group (5 companies totaling 504 men) from California to fight in the east during the Civil War. Led by a young Boston aristocrat, Colonel Charles R. Lowell, these men began their wartime careers in Northern Virginia in 1862, clashing with the partisan rangers of Major John S. Mosby, in a deadly world of guerrilla warfare. In August of 1864, the regiment was assigned to Major General Phil Sheridan's Army of Shenandoah and served through all of the battles in the victorious campaign to clear the valley of Confederates, witnessing the final surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. This account tells what these men from California and Massachusetts accomplished, how they communicated, and how they viewed themselves. The book contains three appendices that list the battle casualties of the regiment during its largest engagements. Photographs and a bibliography are also included.

The territory of Napa County, California, contains more than grapevines. The deepest roots belong to Wappo-speaking peoples, a group whose history has since been buried by the stories of Spanish colonizers, Californios (today's Latinos), African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Euro Americans. Napa's history clearly is one of co-existence; yet, its schoolbooks tell a linear story that climaxes with the arrival of Euro Americans. In "This Land was Mexican Once," Linda Heidenreich excavates Napa's subaltern voices and histories to tell a complex, textured local history with important implications for the larger American West, as well. Heidenreich is part of a new generation of scholars who are challenging not only the old, Euro-American depiction of California, but also the linear method of historical storytelling—a method that inevitably favors the last man writing. She first maps the overlapping histories that comprise Napa's past, then examines how the current version came to dominate—or even erase—earlier events. So while history, in Heidenreich's words, may be "the stuff of nation-building," it can also be "the stuff of resistance." Chapters are interspersed with "source breaks"—raw primary sources that speak for themselves and interrupt the linear, Euro-American telling of Napa's history. Such an inclusive approach inherently acknowledges the connections Napa's peoples have to the rest of the region, for the linear history that marginalizes minorities is not unique to Napa. Latinos, for instance, have populated the American West for centuries, and are still shaping its future. In the end, "This Land was Mexican Once" is more than the story of Napa, it is a multidimensional model for reflecting a multicultural past.

Thoroughly researched and finely crafted, After the Grizzly traces the history of endangered species and habitat in California, from the time of the Gold Rush to the present. Peter S. Alagona shows how scientists and conservationists came to view the fates of endangered species as inextricable from ecological conditions and human activities in the places where those species lived. Focusing on the stories of four high-profile endangered species—the California condor, desert tortoise, Delta smelt, and San Joaquin kit fox—Alagona offers an absorbing account of how Americans developed a political system capable of producing and sustaining debates in which imperiled species serve as proxies for broader conflicts about the politics of place. The challenge for conservationists in the twenty-first century, this book claims, will be to redefine habitat conservation beyond protected wildlands to build more diverse and sustainable landscapes.

Dale L. Walker, historian and author of Legends and Lies: Great Mysteries of the American West, takes on the conquest of California in this vivid portrait of America's manifest destiny. Bear Flag Rising traces the history of California from the Indians who inhabited the land before the first Europeans saw it through the warfare that would finally leave the province in American hands. The lives of the Californios in tranquil days before the advent of American trappers and the steady decline of the province under Mexico's neglectful rule are brought to life in this epic chronicle. Battles and skirmishes, such as the bitter fight on the San Gabriel River during the march to recapture Los Angeles, are meticulously re-created in all their vicious glory. Above all, Bear Flag Rising is rich with the personalities of the conquest--from John Charles Fremont, the ambitious, enigmatic explorer, to Commodore Robert Field Stockton, a wealthy, imperious, and ruthless naval officer, and Stephen Watts Kearny, who made a 2,000-mile overland march from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, annexing New Mexico on the way, and arrived in California to face Mexican lancers in battle. Bear Flag Rising reveals, through exacting research and masterful prose, the full story of how Mexico lost California and how this Pacific paradise went on to become "the greatest jewel in the crown of the American Empire." At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

State geography, history, and culture are presented through directions for drawing the official seal, flag, flower, animal, and tree of the fifty states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.