American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture (Cultural Studies of the United States) (Paperback)

by Brian Roberts (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review
An important work within the context of gold rush studies.

Enterprise & Society

A welcome addition to work on the California gold rush and on nineteenth-century white, middle-class culture.

Journal of American History

Offers a fresh look at a familiar episode in U.S. history.

Journal of the Early Republic

[This book] achieves a "gold standard" by making something as familiar as the Gold Rush uncomfortably new.

American Historical Review

An important book, convincingly relocating the opening cultural crisis of the American middle class.

Harvard Business History Review

Product Description
California during the gold rush was a place of disputed claims, shoot-outs, gambling halls, and prostitution; a place populated by that rough and rebellious figure, the forty-niner; in short, a place that seems utterly unconnected to middle-class culture. In American Alchemy, however, Brian Roberts offers a surprising challenge to this assumption.

Roberts points to a long-neglected truth of the gold rush: many of the northeastern forty-niners who ventured westward were in fact middle-class in origin, status, and values. Tracing the experiences and adventures both of these men and of the "unseen" forty-niners—women who stayed back East while their husbands went out West—he shows that, whatever else the gold seekers abandoned on the road to California, they did not simply turn their backs on middle-class culture.

Ultimately, Roberts argues, the story told here reveals an overlooked chapter in the history of the formation of the middle class. While the acquisition of respectability reflects one stage in this history, he says, the gold rush constitutes a second stage—a rebellion against standards of respectability.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 360 pages
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press (May 10, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807848565
• ISBN-13: 978-0807848562
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #834,458 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incisive, engaging, and eloquent., November 28, 2000

By	Travis Smith (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Full of interesting, charming, and humorous anecdotes gathered from letters and diaries, Roberts accomplishes the elusive task of making history informative and entertaining. Roberts repudiates the notion that the forty-niners were predominately working-class folk, explaining instead that most forty-niners were actually of middle-class origin (pointing out that the trip to California was expensive). These middle-class forty-niners, Roberts illustrates, joined the gold rush as a "rebellion against certain middle-class values; this revolt, in turn, was largely carried out by middle-class individuals." The gold rush provided an escape for those who sought freedom from the confines of Victorian mores.

5.0 out of 5 stars Bold, persuasive, and readable., October 31, 2000

By	G. Wallis (NY) - See all my reviews

Few books have as much to teach about the history of Californians or the United States. I recommend American Alchemy highly to anyone interested in innovative books about American history and culture.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars american alchemy, November 3, 2007

By	tam - See all my reviews

so, the other book called "american alchemy" is a comprehensive history of the "movers and shakers of the solid waste industry in America." coincidence? probably not