Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-262) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: mining gold, remaking white manhood -- Getting to gold: migration and the formation of white manliness -- A white man's republic: republican ideology and popular government in colonial California -- English principles encounter American republicanism: colonial British Columbia -- Pursuing Dame Fortune: risk and reward during the gold rushes -- Dirty clothes, clean bodies: the body and costume of white manliness -- Epilogue: endings and beginnings.
Summary:
"The mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes bring to mind raucous mining camps and slapped-together cities populated by carousing miners, gamblers, and prostitutes. And yet many of the white men who went to the gold fields were products of the Victorian era: the same people popularly remembered as strait-laced, repressed, and order-loving. How do we make sense of this difference? Examining the closely linked gold rushes in California and British Columbia, historian Christopher Herbert shows that gold rushers worried about the meaning of white manhood in the near-anarchic, ethnically mixed societies that grew up around the mines. Their anxieties about reproducing the white male dominance they were accustomed to played a central role in the construction of colonial regimes. As white gold rushers flocked to the mines, they encountered a wide range of people they considered inferior and potentially dangerous to white dominance, including Indigenous people, Latin Americans, Australians, and Chinese. The way that white miners interacted with these groups reflected the distinct political principles and strategies of the US and British colonial governments, as well as the ideas about race and respectability the newcomers brought with them. In addition to renovating traditional understandings of the Pacific Slope gold rushes, Herbert argues that historians' understanding of white manliness has been too fixated on the Eastern United States and Britain. In the nineteenth century, popular attention largely focused on the West, and it was in the gold fields and the cities they spawned that new ideas of white manliness emerged, prefiguring transformations elsewhere."--Provided by publisher.
Series:
Emil and Kathleen Sick series in western history and biography
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.