Spanish authorities used two agencies to occupy and control California as a royal province from 1769 to 1821: the church and the army. While the story of the missions and the missionaries has been thoroughly chronicled, little attention has been focused on the men who comprised Spain's military forces. This thesis examines the experience of the royal soldier in California to determine his significance in the Golden State's Spanish colonial era. The journals, diaries, and correspondence of the soldiers, missionaries, explorers, traders, and foreign rivals who visited or occupied the province comprise a major part' of the source material. The variety of viewpoints represented by these · documents facilitated examination from several perspectives. Another valuable primary source was the Spanish frontier regulations, which provided the royal perspective on the military enterprise. Published materials based on documents in the major archival repositories such as those in Mexico, Spain, and the Bancroft Library in California were accessible through works in the Portland State University Library and the Oregon Historical Society which supplied sources pertinent to this investigation. Secondary works by historians provided both a historical background and data on specific aspects of a soldier's life. Cited periodical articles concentrated more specifically on the military experience both in California and the Spanish northern frontier.

No description available.

No description available.

In recent decades there has been a great deal of scholarly and scientific work examining both the impact and the transmission of trauma. The focus of this thesis is the transmission of the trauma of genocide and large-scale historical traumas, specifically that seen in the Holocaust and the missionization of the California Indians in the 18th century. Through the analysis of the autobiographical narratives composed by three generations of Holocaust survivors, as well as one composed by a later generation descendant of the California Mission Indians, I argue that silence is not only a manifestation of trauma but also a tool of its transmission. I further argue that when this silence is broken and the stories are told we begin to see a shift in the traumatic memory away from re-traumatizing the later generations and toward preserving an accurate historical memory without the significant psychological cost to the later generations. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The essential objective of this study was to fill a bibliographic void of secondary source material concerning Russian California. This was accomplished by combining available translations and more specific studies on the subject into one extensive work. Introductory chapters provide: (1) a brief statement regarding Russia's massive eastward expansion through Siberia, to Kamchatka and Alaska; (2) an examination of the nature of the Russian-American Company; and (3) a detailed look at the programs instituted by the Company to provision Alaska and Kamchatka. The establishment of Fort Ross in 1811 is viewed as one of those programs. The settlement's primary function throughout its existence was to send foodstuffs to Russia's northern colonies. The main body of the paper describes fully the structure of the settlement and analyzes the various activities, undertaken by the Russians at Fort Ross, in order to provide grain to the Company. Those activities were sea otter hunting, manufacturing, and agriculture and animal husbandry. In closing, the paper focuses on the Native Californians of Fort Ross, detailing their culture and their relationship with imperialist powers in nineteenth-century California. The industries of Fort Ross--hunting, manufacturing, and husbandry--met with failure. Each endeavor proved to be either inadequate or untimely: The harvesting of pelts was quickly curtailed by the depletion of animal populations; a successful manufacturing enterprise was interrupted by foreign competition; and lack of labor and expertise hindered the Russians' effort to transform the Ross Counter into the Company’s “granary.” The research conducted for this study led to the conclusion that the Russians' decision to abandon their California settlement was finalized when another means to provision the northern colonies became available. A Study of Fort Ross necessarily demands an international historical perspective. A consideration of the Spanish colonial enterprise in Mexico and California, the British activities in the Pacific Northwest, and the increasing strength of the United States on the western coast of North America are essential in understanding the failure of the Russians at Fort Ross and in Alaska. A number of published, primary source materials were used exhaustively to complete this study. A complete selected bibliography is included. Several categories of material were of prime importance. Briefly, they are: (1) correspondence between the Chief Manager of the Russian-American Company colonies in Alaska and the Company’s Main Office in St. Petersburg. These documents are available on microfilm in the National Archives and in Vneshniaia Politika Rossii, Series I and II, edited by N. N. Bolkhovitinov. (2) Journals, kept by navigators who participated in Russian circumnavigations which made calls in the Russian America, are invaluable sources of information on the circumstances of the colonies. (3) Reports of Company employees, such as Kirill T. Klebnikov and Ferdinand P. Wrangell provide important statistical information on agricultural production, otter hunting, manufacturing, and the population of Russian California. As mentioned, secondary sources on Russian California are scarce. However, James R. Gibson's work, Imperial Russia in Frontier America, does offer a thorough treatment of Russian trade and husbandry in California.

A theoretical framework is developed for incorporating class conflict dynamics into accumulation theories of labor market segmentation by analyzing the transaction costs of conflict under varying conditions of economic structure and power resources. The theory has the "bottom up" perspective developed in the "new social history." Skill is treated as a status for which workers struggle and internal labor market hierarchies are considered products of the conflicting strategies between capital and labor. Split-labor market theory is also discussed as a method for explaining why workers discriminate. This theory is amended to distinguish between market and class interests of workers, and to take into account the self-perpetuating economic effects of racist discourse. My historical analysis of the metal-mining industry emphasizes the formation of ethnically stratified segments of the labor market in which Chinese and Mexican workers were denied access to the craft-internal labor market for skilled workers. Competition over mining claims under the threat of takeover by mining companies created ethnic antagonism between Chinese and white independent petty-commodity miners. Discrimination by the white independent miners crowded the Chinese into the labor market, which reduced Chinese wages, and induced conflict between white and Chinese wage workers in the company-mines. Ethnic antagonism in combination with intense class struggle produced a segregated labor market between Mexican miners and Anglo supervisors during the initial proletarianization of the mines. Mexican miners were later displaced by Cornish miners who developed a segregated craft-internal labor market. Analysis of the labor process shows that mechanization initially facilitated the struggle by Cornish miners for a skilled status, contrary to homogenization expectations. Mexican miners were relegated to unskilled manual positions.

In the middle of the California Desert is an inland desert sea, called the Salton Sea. Its existence is curious, nearly magical. It is California’s largest lake, it is saltier than the Pacific Ocean, it is slowly dying, and its existence is a complete accident. This thesis breaks down the historical narrative of the Salton Sea from a white settler perspective, using theories posed by Yi Fu Tuan about distinctions between space and place. The temporality of spatial locations, the construction of the binaries natural/built, and the moralizing of landscapes all provide further understanding of the Salton Sea’s existence. Throughout history, the white settlers of the Imperial Desert have projected, their morals and desires upon the desert landscape, reforming the space into their vision of the future as a result of their abilities to tame and control rivers. Instead of a future, they produced a place replete with the past: a place considered worthless and potentially dangerous. Through looking at the constructions of space, place, memory, and history, we are better able to understand the birth of this desert sea.

The following pages recount the struggle and criticism that went into bringing the first imported water to Los Angeles, the reasons the water was necessary, the legal bases on which water was acquired, and the end results on the distant Owens River Valley.

The following pages recount the struggle and criticism that went into bringing the first imported water to Los Angeles, the reasons the water was necessary, the legal bases on which water was acquired, and the end results on the distant Owens River Valley.

The issue of gaining access to enough water in California has shaped how the state has developed and it has been one of the most important and divisive political issues for all of its residents. In a state where “75 percent of the demand for water originates south of Sacramento, although 75 percent of water supply in the state comes from north of the capital city,” the decision of who should get access to the limited supply of water is fiercely contested between opposing parties who all feel that they have a right to the water necessary to keep them alive. But with the amount of useable water slowly declining and an ever-growing population with greater demand for water, there is no easy compromise or solution that solves the problem of how water should be distributed.