Mono Lake
Mono Lake

Author: Abraham Hoffman

Publisher: UNM Press

Published: 2014-04-01

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 0826354459

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Mono Lake is one of the largest lakes in California, and Californians have been using it, enjoying it, and abusing it since nomadic northern Paiutes began hunting the lake’s vast bird populations. Controversy between environmentalists and the City of Los Angeles brought so much attention to Mono Lake in the late twentieth century that it became best known for its appearance on “Save Mono Lake” bumper stickers. This thoughtful study is the first book to explore the lake’s environmental and cultural history. Hoffman writes about gold mining in the Mono Basin; the taking of birds and their eggs to supply food for miners and townspeople; a failed oil boom; efforts to develop recreational activities such as a state-operated marina, which also failed; catastrophes including plane crashes and the testing of bombs underwater; and litigation over the diversion of creeks flowing into the lake and the resulting decline in the lake level. A variety of photographs, some never before published, ranging from mining to motor boat races in the 1930s are also included.

The Bonanza King
The Bonanza King

Author: Gregory Crouch

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2018-06-19

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 1501108212

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“A monumentally researched biography of one of the nineteenth century’s wealthiest self-made Americans…Well-written and worthwhile” (The Wall Street Journal) it’s the rags-to-riches frontier tale of an Irish immigrant who outwits, outworks, and outmaneuvers thousands of rivals to take control of Nevada’s Comstock Lode. Born in 1831, John W. Mackay was a penniless Irish immigrant who came of age in New York City, went to California during the Gold Rush, and mined without much luck for eight years. When he heard of riches found on the other side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1859, Mackay abandoned his claim and walked a hundred miles to the Comstock Lode in Nevada. Over the course of the next dozen years, Mackay worked his way up from nothing, thwarting the pernicious “Bank Ring” monopoly to seize control of the most concentrated cache of precious metals ever found on earth, the legendary “Big Bonanza,” a stupendously rich body of gold and silver ore discovered 1,500 feet beneath the streets of Virginia City, the ultimate Old West boomtown. But for the ore to be worth anything it had to be found, claimed, and successfully extracted, each step requiring enormous risk and the creation of an entirely new industry. Now Gregory Crouch tells Mackay’s amazing story—how he extracted the ore from deep underground and used his vast mining fortune to crush the transatlantic telegraph monopoly of the notorious Jay Gould. “No one does a better job than Crouch when he explores the subject of mining, and no one does a better job than he when he describes the hardscrabble lives of miners” (San Francisco Chronicle). Featuring great period photographs and maps, The Bonanza King is a dazzling tour de force, a riveting history of Virginia City, Nevada, the Comstock Lode, and America itself.

Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 1
Early Tales and Sketches, Volume 1

Author: Mark Twain

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1979-12-12

Total Pages: 814

ISBN-13: 052090575X

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This collection brings together for the first time more than 360 of Mark Twain's short works written between 1851, the year of his first extant sketch, and 1871, when he renounced his ties with the Buffalo Express and the Galaxy, resolving to "write but little for periodicals hereafter." In October 1871 Clemens and his family moved to Hartford, where they would live until 1891. No longer a journalist, he was about to complete his second full-length book, Roughing It. The literary apprenticeship that he had begun twenty years before in the print shops of Hannibal, and pursued in the newspaper offices of Virginia City, San Francisco, and Buffalo, had at last come to a close. The selections included in these volumes represent a generous sampling from Mark Twain's most imaginative journalism, a few set speeches, a few poems, and hundreds of tales and sketches recovered from more than fifty newspapers and journals, as well as two dozen unpublished items of various description—the main body of what can now be found of his early literary and subliterary work, though by no means everything written during those twenty years of experimentation. The selections are ordered chronologically and therefore provide a nearly continuous record of the author's literary activity from his earliest juvenilia up through the mature work that he published in the Galaxy, the Buffalo Express, and many other journals.

Silver Kings
Silver Kings

Author: Oscar Lewis

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2012-12-05

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 0307828042

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Thousands of readers remember with pleasure Oscar Lewis’s fine book on the Western railroad robber barons, The Big Four. Silver Kings is a companion piece, dealing as it does with the big four of the Nevada Comstock Lode, one of the greatest of all silver mines. These were really fabulous men who led strangely fascinating lives. John W. Mackay (the father of Clarence Mackay), best known of the four, built up the Postal Telegraph and Commercial Cable systems. His wife, Marie Hungerford, for years after her marriage saw little of America, but kept the society of Paris and London agog. James G. Fair was a master mechanic and one of the shrewdest of financiers—of all the Comstock’s conspicuous figures easily the least admired, a fact of which he was aware and which he regarded with complete indifference. He became a United State Senator and his elder daughter, Tessie, married Herman Oelrichs, then a thirty-seven-year-old bachelor and member of the prominent New York and Newport family. James Clair Flood’s great mansion atop Nob Hill in San Francisco is now the Pacific Union Club. William S. O’Brien, Flood’s partner, was the most shadowy of the quartet. It’s a rich field that Mr. Lewis has mined, and his story, which never lags, is set against the stunning background of the Virginia City of the seventies as well as the San Francisco of that era. The result is a really magnificent piece of authentic Americana.

Historic Nevada Waters
Historic Nevada Waters

Author: Hunt Janin

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2019-04-12

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 147667261X

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The Great Basin is a hydrographic region that includes most of Nevada and parts of five other Western states. The histories of four of the Western rivers of the Great Basin--the Walker, the Truckee, the Carson and the Humboldt--are explored in this book, along with three of the western lakes of the Great Basin: Lake Tahoe, Pyramid Lake, and Walker Lake. Drawing on a range of sources, the coauthors address both the natural and the human aspects of the history and likely futures of Great Basin waterways.

Intellectual Property Law and History
Intellectual Property Law and History

Author: Steven Wilf

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 845

ISBN-13: 1351562657

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Intellectual property has become a dominant feature of our knowledge based economy in recent years, but how has property rights in intangible items developed? This book brings together for the first time exemplary scholarship with diverse approaches to the history of United States intellectual property protection, including trade secrets, trademark, copyright, and patent law. These articles, written by leading experts in the field and often challenging conventional narratives, underscore the importance of historical perspectives for understanding how an extensive, evolving framework for the regulation of knowledge emerged in the modern period. By tracing intellectual property from an historical perspective - not merely providing justifications in philosophy or economics in the abstract - this book draws upon the past to address contemporary debates over such varied topics as: access to knowledge; policing copyright infringement; whether employees should own the products of their minds; the role of national borders in an age of digital information; and the very future of intellectual property as stakeholders and consumers contest the extent of its legal protection.