Riches For All: The California Gold Rush and the World (review)
The official California Gold-Rush-to-Statehood Sesquicentennial Commission was authorized by the state of California to raise millions of dollars from the private sector to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the events that propelled California to a miraculously swift admission as the thirty-first state. As retired history professor Kenneth N. Owens of California State University Sacramento points out in his Preface, the Commission failed in its fundraising goals. Yet all was not lost; for before, during, and after the two-year observance there occurred a number of challenging / reassessments of the Gold Rush by historians, and these re-evaluations succeeded in laying down a challenging and nuanced interpretation of the Gold Rush that, in effect, demanded that Californians, indeed, all Americans, abandon stereotypes in favor of a sense of history enlivened by nearly four decades of revisionist inquiry.