California History articles from January 1 2003

California History archives from January 1 2003

Preface.
January 1, 2003... As much as today's state legislators, officials, and bureaucrats are criticized in California--sometimes with just cause--the first generation of political and governmental leaders was even more vilified in its own day. Many of them, it turned...

Taming the elephant: an introduction to California's statehood and constitutional era.
January 1, 2003... The phrase "seeing the elephant" was frequently used during the California Gold Rush by western sojourners to describe their encounters with strange and alien situations or exotic and enlivening experiences--something as unique as actually...

A violent birth: disorder, crime, and law enforcement, 1849-1890.(bandit Joaquin Murieta and others)
January 1, 2003... On the winter morning of February 20, 1853, more than a hundred Chinese miners were working their claims near Rich Gulch. Without warning, five mounted and gun-brandishing bandidos swept down upon them. Taken by surprise and without arms...

The courts, the legal profession, and the development of law in early California.
January 1, 2003... The Gold Rush flooded California with people seeking riches and expecting the institutions of the law to protect their interests. To create those institutions, delegates went to Monterey in 1849 for the first state constitutional convention....

"We feel the want of protection": The politics of law and race in California, 1848-1878.
January 1, 2003... California's history has been entangled in romanticized accounts of the daring Spanish conquest of savage but pliant Indians, of tradition-bound California stewards, and of hard-driving, entrepreneurial Yankee Argonauts. (1) These fictions were...

Capturing California.
January 1, 2003... Late in the evening of May 3, 1851, as San Francisco was once again easing from boisterous Saturday night to quiescent Sunday morning, a fire started somewhere among the hotels, gambling houses, and saloons of its crowded downtown plaza. The...

"Officialdom": California state government, 1849-1879.
January 1, 2003... An overview of California government in the three decades between the first and second constitutional conventions reveals clear patterns of change. At the outset (including the first two legislative sessions), government was creative and...

"None could deny the eloquence of this lady": women, law, and government in California, 1850-1890.
January 1, 2003... Although women played no direct role in California law and politics until 1870, both their interest in law reform and their later entry into the political arena can be traced in part to two sections of the constitution that went into effect at...

The beginnings of Anglo-American local government in California.
January 1, 2003... California local government in the Anglo-American period did not get off to a particularly auspicious start. For a short time during the United States military occupation and thereafter, some of the Hispanic institutions, especially the office...

An uncertain influence: the role of the federal government in California, 1846-1880.
January 1, 2003... Did rugged individualists tame the West, or did pioneers merely arrive at a well-ordered colony of the federal government? Popular myth enshrines the first view. In 1991, however, "New" Western historian Richard White, building on more than a...