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$22.95 $13.77 |
When Josephine Knowles left for the Klondike gold fields with her husband in 1898, she didn’t know she would be facing a constant battle with cold, disease, malnutrition and the ever-present possibility of death. Gold Rush in the Klondike is Knowles’s true story of her year in the Yukon territory, a revealing, never-before-published personal memoir of day-to-day life at the height of the Klondike Gold Rush. Written in a clear, forthright, nineteenth-century style, Gold Rush in the Klondike presents terrifying struggles against a hostile environment, picturesque descriptions of an untouched Arctic wilderness and Knowles’s keen observations of men and women on the frontier. A Victorian gentlewoman of refinement, Knowles found herself among swearing, whoring, sometimes violent miners, whom she won over with her grit and compassion. Deciding to never moralize or condemn, Knowles writes frankly of the intense hardships that drove miners into lives of drink and dissipation and the frontier women who were forced to make stark choices between prostitution and starvation. Knowles’s adventures include encounters with author Jack London (Knowles firmly disapproved of London’s cruel mistreatment of his sled dogs), nursing miners during a typhoid outbreak until she fell ill herself, witnessing savage fights among the miners, dangerous travel through the mountain passes and river rapids of the Yukon, and a daring surreptitious visit to a gambling saloon. Amid all hardships, Knowles formed warm relationships with the mining community, for, as she put it, “All the diseases and other troubles had knitted us into one large family.” Illustrated with period photographs, Gold Rush in the Klondike is an invaluable historical document of a lost time and place and an admirable portrait of one woman’s determination in the face of danger.
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$25.00 $15.00 |
In this collection of firsthand accounts by those who knew Cesar Chavez best, a portrait of an uncommonly complex man, both driven and focused, yet humble, empathic and exceedingly principled, emerges. The reader gains an understanding of the yoke Chavez chose to place upon his own shoulders, as well as the ideals he employed to accomplish for the migrant farmworkers what many predicted would be impossible. The more than 45 contributors range from the famous--Edward James Olmos, Henry Cisneros, Martin Sheen, Coretta Scott King, Jerry Brown and others--to members of the Chavez family, to UFW staff, to the farmworkers themselves. Illustrated by the compelling black and white photographs of George Elfie Ballis, who began photographing the farmworker movement in the 1950s.
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$16.95 $10.17 |
Subtitle: "Memoirs of a Chippie of the California Highway Patrol". Bringing to light an entertaining array of anecdotes, this collection of police stories recalls some of the strangest, funniest, and most poignant accounts from the freeways, highways, and country roads throughout California. From the family who pulled over for a picnic on the median strip of a busy freeway to the angelic-looking 5-year-old girl who defused a tense traffic stop by sweetly confessing, ?my daddy has a beer under the seat,? this is an uncompromising view of the everyday pursuits, enforcement stops, arrests, accidents, and weird encounters that patrolmen must endure. Also featured is a panoply of unlikely drunk-driving suspects, including Santa Claus, a Boy Scout troop leader, a newlywed couple, and an airline pilot on his way to fly a plane; the traffic stop of an elderly driver whose license had expired 35 years earlier?and who explained he was on his way to the DMV; and many more hilarious, odd, and tragic stories of life and death on the open road. Encouraging a renewed respect for the men and women in uniform who risk their lives to protect the public, this compilation also contains advice on highway safety and how to behave when pulled over by a patrol officer.
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$21.95 $13.17 |
Early one spring morning, disaster struck San Francisco, and a young man grabbed his camera and started documenting the destruction and death surrounding him. Fearlessly going to the center of the devastation, the man captured scenes of fires, collapsing buildings, and people fleeing for their lives—scenes that no one else had a chance to record. His photographs were preserved in a family photo album, unseen by the public for over a hundred years. When San Francisco Burned presents for the first time the photographs that young man, L ouis P. Selby, took of the Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906. These amazingly detailed and dramatic photographs show the earthquake and its aftermath from a street-level perspective, giving readers an unprecedented look at what it was really like to be in San Francisco during those terrible days. Selby’s photographs document the immediate damage of the earthquake; horrific action shots of fire consuming San Francisco; the heroic efforts of police, soldiers, and ordinary citizens to maintain order and protect the people; the somber ruins of San Francisco after the blaze; the misery and pluck of the refugee camps; and the city’s earliest days of rebirth and rebuilding. These unique, never-before-published photographs show the horrors of the earthquake and fire—and the stubborn resistance of the people of San Francisco—like you’ve never seen them before. An invaluable addition to the historical record, When San Francisco Burned is a must-have book for anyone who loves San Francisco and its history.
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$18.95 $11.37 |
It was another time. Deadly earthquakes, steamboat explosions, floods, train wrecks, and other tragedies were a part of everyday life in nineteenth-century California. Yet, the men and women of the day licked their wounds, mourned their dead, picked up the pieces, and plunged ahead to build a great prosperous new state that took its place in the forefront of our great Union. This is their stories, in their own words. First-person accounts of the major 19th century California catastrophes. Includes scores of contemporary period photographs and other illustrations.