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...Vizetelly, writing under the pseudonym J. Tyrwhitt Brooks, recalls an expedition to California he took between 1847-1848 . Originally, he planned to enlist as a surgeon for the US Army during the Mexican war, but conflicts had ended by the time he applied. In a quick change of plans, he joined a group of pro...

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...dern preservationists. His letters, essays, and books telling of his adventures in nature, and wildlife, especially in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, were read by millions and are still popular today. His direct activism helped to save the Yosemite Valley and other wilderness areas. The Sierra Club, which he founded, is now one of the most important conservatio...

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...Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe moved to California from Massachusetts during the Gold Rush of the mid-1800’s. During her travels, Louise was offered the opportunity to write for The Herald about her travel adventures. It was at this point that Louise chose the name...

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... by “imprudent speculations,” and that they are discussing what to do. They decide to buy a wagon and three yoke of unbroke oxen and head overland to California. We were two such precious dunces,” writes Lavinia Honeyman Porter in her autobiographical account of their journey across the plains. “In a short time the six oxen were bought, driven to our home and turned loose ...

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...Bret Harte (August 25, 1836 – May 6, 1902) was an American author and poet, best remembered for his accounts of pioneering life in California. (Summary from Wikipedia)...

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.../ volunteers bring you 17 recordings of Let Us Make Each Day Our Birthday by S.A.R., from The California Birthday Book (1909). This was the Weekly Poetry project for January 31st, 2010....

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...Padre Ignacio has been the pastor of California mission Santa Ysabel del Mar for twenty years. In 1855 a stranger rides into the mission bringing news and a spiritual crisis. It's really more of a novella than a novel. (Summary by David Wales)...

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...California, the land of sunshine and roses, with its genial climate, its skies as blue as the far-famed skies of Venice, and its pure, life-giving air, invites the lover of nature to take long tramps over hill and dale, mount...

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...While describing his dining experiences throughout Bohemian San Francisco, Clarence Edwords paints an historic panorama of California cuisine with all its cosmopolitan influences. Best of all, he offers tantalizing recipes culled from conversations with the master chefs of 1914 in The City by the Bay. (Summary by Denny)...

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...Barrelled Detective Story is a novel by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), in which Sherlock Holmes finds himself in the American west. At a mining camp in California, Fetlock Jones, a nephew of Sherlock Holmes, kills his master, a silver-miner, by blowing up his cabin. Since this occurs when Holmes happens to be visiting, he brings his skills to bear upon the case and arrives a...

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...In July 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson left Scotland to meet his future wife in her native California. Leaving by ship from Glasgow, Scotland, he determined to travel in steerage class to see how the working classes fared. At the last minute he was convinced by friends to purchase a ticket one grade above the lowes...

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...The [five] lectures were written primarily to be delivered at the summer sessions of the University of California, at Berkeley and at Los Angeles, in the summer of 1918. . . they are the outgrowth of almost a quarter of a century spent in work for the blind, and were written from the standpoint of a blind person, seeking to be...

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...cter in the novel. For his role in the Sontag and Evans gang which robbed the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1890s, Morrell spent fourteen years in California prisons (1894-1908), five of them in solitary confinement. London championed his pardon. After his release, Morrell was a frequent guest at London's Beauty Ranch....

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...nd Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog. In it, the narrator retells a story he heard from a bartender, Simon Wheeler, at the Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, about the gambler Jim Smiley. Upon discovering a French translation of this story, Twain re-translated the story, word for word and keeping the French grammar structure, back into English. He then published all th...

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...Bret Harte (1836 – 1902) was an American author and poet, best remembered for his accounts of pioneering life in California.... He moved to California in 1853, later working there in a number of capacities, including miner, teacher, messenger, and journalist. He spent part of his life in the northern California coastal town of Union (no...

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Short memory of boyhood by a little-known American poet based in Carmel-By-The-Sea, California. (Summary by BellonaTimes)

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...Set in Old California in the wake of the Mexican-American War, Ramona is two stories at once. It is the story of the love between a part-Native American orphan girl, Ramona, and Alessandro, a young Indian sheepherder. It is also the sto...

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...written by Helen Hunt Jackson (1884), is the story of a part-Scottish and part-Native American orphan girl growing up and getting married in Southern California, suffering racial discrimination and hardship. Originally serialized in the Christian Union on a weekly basis, the novel became immensely popular. Overall, it has had more than 300 printings, been made into four fi...

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...berg and contains articles from TERRITORIAL ENTERPRISE, THE SAN FRANCISCO DAILY MORNING CALL, THE SACRAMENTO DAILY UNION, DAILY HAWAIIAN HERALD, ALTA CALIFORNIA, THE CHICAGO REPUBLICAN, and THE GALAXY. (Introduction by John Greenman)...

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...e.—This address was delivered shortly after Mr. Darrow's triumphant acquittal on a charge growing out of his defense of the McNamaras at Los Angeles, California. The man, the subject and the occasion makes it one of the greatest speeches of our time. It is the hope of the publishers that this message of Mr. Darrow's may reach the millions of men, women and youth of our cou...

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...k Dog, half-mad Ben Gunn, and (of course) Long John Silver. Arr Jim lad! R.L. Stevenson (1850-1894) was born in Scotland and travelled extensively in California and the south Pacific. (Summary by Adrian Praetzellis)...

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...this collection of shorter stories we visit Malay pirates, have a couple of tales of India, a shipwreck off the Channel Islands and a bursting dam in California, and finish off escaping from captivity in China (Summary by annise)...

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..., Julia must be their live-in housekeeper and babysitter for Ellen's four children. But Julia's college-age niece and nephew arrive unexpectedly from California and offer Aunt Cloudy Jewel a surprise opportunity she never expected in her wildest dreams. (Summary by Joy Easton)...

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...s were performed made by 17 talented university student musicians who are sisters in the Sigma Alpha Iota International Music Fraternity for Women at California State University-Stanislaus. The project was conceived as an opportunity to offer service to the music-loving community around the world and to children everywhere. [Summary written by Dennis Sayers]....

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...Frank Norris based his 1901 novel The Octopus (A Story of California) on the Mussel Slough Tragedy of 1880, a bloody conflict between ranchers and agents of the Southern Pacific Railroad. The central issue was over the ownership of the ranches, which the farmers had leased from the ...

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...The Donner Party was a group of California-bound American settlers caught up in the westering fever of the 1840s. After becoming snowbound in the Sierra Nevada in the winter of 1846–1847, some of the emigrants resorted to cannibalism. Although this aspect o...

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...othy and the Wizard in Oz was the fourth of 14 Oz books written by L. Frank Baum (1856-1919). Published in 1908, while Baum was resident in Coronado, California, it is considered one of the “darker” of the Oz tales. However, it also is enlivened by Baum’s considerable wit, penchant for puns, and dry social commentary. In this title, Dorothy, her kitten Eureka, Jim, a cab h...

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...This is the story of Buck, dog napped from sunny California to snowy Arctic during the Alaska gold rush. This deservedly famous book has been already recorded by and downloaded more than 100,000 times. Why, then, would anyone suggest another recording? Because this will be ...

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...Sky Island (1912) was the second of three titles written by Baum featuring a spunky girl from California, Trot, and her companion, the old sailorman, Cap’n Bill. Baum had hoped to end the Oz series in 1910 and the following year he introduced Trot and Cap’n Bill in The Sea Fairies. In Sky Island, they journey to an is...

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...ing to the Internet Movie Data Base he is credited with 110 films made from his stories and books. Grey died from a heart attack in 1939 in Altadena, California. In The Shortstop (1909) drawing on his baseball experience Grey follows the adventures of seventeen year-old Chase Alloway on his quest to make his fortune as a baseball player and lift his family out of poverty. ...

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...rs an in depth account behind the need for a mail route to connect the eastern U.S. with the rapidly populating west coast following the gold rush of California, the springing up of lumber camps, and all incidental needs arising from the settling of the western frontier. Here we learn of the inception of the Pony Express, its formation, successes, failures, facts, statisti...

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...The Land of Little Rain is a book of sketches which portray the high desert country of southern California, where the Sierras descend into the Mojave Desert. Mary Austin finds beauty in the harsh landscape: This is the sense of the desert hills--that there is room enough and time enough. . . The treeless spaces uncramp ...

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...ust the start of Dorothy's adventures in this exciting and fun book. She and her kitten, Eureka are on their way home and stop to visit a relative in California. But the earthquake opens the ground under their feet and everyone, including the horse and buggy and her cousin Zeb fall deep, deep into the earth. Down there they find they can walk on air, but are attacked by th...

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...Daisy Miller, Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove and others). The aptly named Christopher Newman, having made a small fortune from business in California, has come to the Old World for the first time, determined to enlarge his experience by learning all he can of it. In Paris he meets an old acquaintance, Tom Tristram, who (though he himself has little interest in e...

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... and Harpo Marx, he was an original member of the Algonquin Round Table. His popularity led him to a side career in radio and film, which took him to California in his later years. Writers as diverse as James Thurber, Woody Allen and Dave Barry have credited Benchley as an influence. Love Conquers All , originally published in 1922 is the second collection (of fifteen) gat...

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...The journal of nature-lover John Muir who spent the summer of 1869 walking California’s Sierra Nevada range. From French Bar to Mono Lake and the Yosemite Valley, Muir was awestruck by everything he saw. The antics of the smallest “insect people” amazed him as much as stunted thousand-year old Junip...

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...ctions in her history A Century of Dishonor (1881). Her novel Ramona dramatized the federal government's mistreatment of Native Americans in Southern California and attracted considerable attention to her cause. Fiske attended Ipswich Female Seminary and the Abbott Institute, a boarding school run by Reverend J.S.C. Abbott in New York City. She was a classmate of the poet ...

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...the Audubon Magazine and later as books. In A-Birding on a Bronco, she writes an engaging memoir about her several trips to study birds on a ranch in California in the late 1800's....

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...s, smokestacks, national organizations, and streets of little houses all alike. Their vacation started as a long motor drive through the backwoods of California (Charlotte's husband, Ned, owned the Jordan Motor Car Company). It ended with a month long trek through Death Valley in an old milk wagon drawn by a horse and a mule. Edna's descriptions of the desert are superb an...

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...Buck is living a happy life in California until he is sold to pay a gambling debt. Taken to the Klondike to become a sled dog, Buck must toughen up and learn the harsher rules of survival in the North. One of the first of these is how to deal with being ha...

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...st known today for his western fiction. Faust was born in Seattle, Washington and at an early age moved with his parents to the San Joaquin Valley in California where he worked as a ranchhand. After a failed attempt to enlist in the Great War in 1917 and with the help of Mark Twain's sister he met Robert Hobart Davis, editor of All-Story Weekly and became a regular contrib...

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...ave to depend on himself. How John Muir made his way from that Wisconsin farm to become the great American naturalist, spokesman for Yosemite and the California redwoods, is the stuff of legend: which makes Muir's autobiographical account of his early boyhood a fascinating read. (Summary by Sue Anderson)...