Gateway to Alta California

Gateway to Alta California

Author: Harry W. Crosby

Publisher:

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13:

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The first time -- plus pertinent information on their backgrounds and future lives (including those who continued on in July of 1769 with Gaspar de Portola, seeking the port of Monterey). Book jacket.


Antigua California

Antigua California

Author: Harry W. Crosby

Publisher: UNM Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 608

ISBN-13: 9780826314956

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This Spanish Borderlands classic recounts Jesuit colonization of the Old California, the peninsula now known as Baja California.


Colombia

Colombia

Author: Lois Markham

Publisher: Cavendish Square Publishing

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 70

ISBN-13: 9780761401407

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Introduces the geography, history, people, and culture of the country known as the Gateway to South America.


The Silver Dons

The Silver Dons

Author: Richard F. Pourade

Publisher:

Published: 1963

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13:

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Describes how the Spanish Dons wrested the Californian lands from the missionaries and lost them to the American pioneers with the start of the gold rush.


Boise

Boise

Author: Clay Morgan

Publisher: Farcountry Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 112

ISBN-13: 9781560370451

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Southern California Gardens

Southern California Gardens

Author: Victoria Padilla

Publisher:

Published: 1961

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13:

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Account of the land and its flora, both native and naturalized, and of the men and women who devoted themselves to its cultivation.


Alta California

Alta California

Author: Steven W. Hackel

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2010-11-16

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 0520289048

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"A set of probing and fascinating essays by leading scholars, Alta California illuminates the lives of missionaries and Indians in colonial California. With unprecedented depth and precision, the essays explore the interplay of race and culture among the diverse peoples adapting to the radical transformations of a borderland uneasily shared by natives and colonizers."—Alan Taylor, author of The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution "In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the missions of California and the communities that sprang up around them constituted a unique laboratory where ethnic, imperial, and national identities were molded and transformed. A group of distinguished scholars examine these identities through a variety of sources ranging from mission records and mitochondrial DNA to the historical memory of California's early history."—Andrés Reséndez, author of Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850


Junipero Serra

Junipero Serra

Author: Steven W. Hackel

Publisher: Hill and Wang

Published: 2013-09-03

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0374711097

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A portrait of the priest and colonialist who is one of the most important figures in California's history In the 1770s, just as Britain's American subjects were freeing themselves from the burdens of colonial rule, Spaniards moved up the California coast to build frontier outposts of empire and church. At the head of this effort was Junípero Serra, an ambitious Franciscan who hoped to convert California Indians to Catholicism and turn them into European-style farmers. For his efforts, he has been beatified by the Catholic Church and widely celebrated as the man who laid the foundation for modern California. But his legacy is divisive. The missions Serra founded would devastate California's Native American population, and much more than his counterparts in colonial America, he remains a contentious and contested figure to this day. Steven W. Hackel's groundbreaking biography, Junípero Serra: California's Founding Father, is the first to remove Serra from the realm of polemic and place him within the currents of history. Born into a poor family on the Spanish island of Mallorca, Serra joined the Franciscan order and rose to prominence as a priest and professor through his feats of devotion and powers of intellect. But he could imagine no greater service to God than converting Indians, and in 1749 he set off for the new world. In Mexico, Serra first worked as a missionary to Indians and as an uncompromising agent of the Inquisition. He then became an itinerant preacher, gaining a reputation as a mesmerizing orator who could inspire, enthrall, and terrify his audiences at will. With a potent blend of Franciscan piety and worldly cunning, he outmaneuvered Spanish royal officials, rival religious orders, and avaricious settlers to establish himself as a peerless frontier administrator. In the culminating years of his life, he extended Spanish dominion north, founding and promoting missions in present-day San Diego, Los Angeles, Monterey, and San Francisco. But even Serra could not overcome the forces massing against him. California's military leaders rarely shared his zeal, Indians often opposed his efforts, and ultimately the missions proved to be cauldrons of disease and discontent. Serra, in his hope to save souls, unwittingly helped bring about the massive decline of California's indigenous population. On the three-hundredth anniversary of Junípero Serra's birth, Hackel's complex, authoritative biography tells the full story of a man whose life and legacies continue to be both celebrated and denounced. Based on exhaustive research and a vivid narrative, this is an essential portrait of America's least understood founder.