The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World

Books

In January 1848, a carpenter spotted flecks of gold in a shallow stream at Sutter's Mill in California-triggering the greatest voluntary migration in U.S. history and jolting a fragile republic already sliding toward crisis. In The Rush, Nathaniel Philbrick transforms the Gold Rush from a tale of sudden riches into the origin story of America's modern capital consolidated at dizzying speed, democracy in thrall to private power, xenophobia weaponized in the name of liberty-and a stubborn belief in the American experiment that refuses to die. This is the story of a nation tearing at the seams-a republic tested by its own ideals. From the feverish gold-mining camps of the Sierra Nevada mountains to the wharves and vigilance committees of San Francisco, Philbrick renders a combustible, all-world Chilean brothers reinventing themselves to outrun prejudice; Native communities navigating dispossession and violence; the merchant-showman Samuel Brannan, drawn into the center of early vigilantism; and the ...