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(Genesis 11:1-9)

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The tower of Babel (2242-2206 BC) was a post-flood rebellion against God by Noah's descendants. Though the Babel account is related in a mere nine verses (Genesis 11:1-9), the resulting judgment of this rebellion accounts for the variety of languages and people groups seen in our world today.

The Biblical Account

When God blessed Noah and his sons after the global flood, he told them to "be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth" (Genesis 9:1). But only about a century later, we see that man seems to have no interest in obeying the command to fill the earth.

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly." And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth." (Genesis 11:1-4)

Fueled by pride, the people preferred to "make a name" for themselves and build a city with a high tower, enabling them to remain together in defiance of God's command. The proposed construction began. Composed of brick and mortar, this city was intended to be permanent and impressive-a fortress against any natural or supernatural attempt to disperse mankind throughout the earth.

But God was neither unaware of their actions nor powerless against their plans. In his mercy, he intervened-not by destruction as he had during the flood, nor by directly driving them out to be fugitives and wanderers (as in the record of Cain's judgment; see Genesis 4:12). Instead, God divided their single language into multiple language families.

And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. And the Lord said, "Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech." (Genesis 11:5-7)

For the first time in earth's history, there was a language barrier. Without a common language, the people who had been so adamant about staying together were now unable to even understand each other. Construction of the city ceased-whether because they lost interest in the city due to the futility of attempting to coordinate such a massive project without a means of communication (not to mention losing the appeal of living together as one people) or because they recognized God's judgment and feared a worse sentence should they attempt to continue in their rebellion.

Whatever the case, God's judgment was effective. The attempted "one-world kingdom" fractured. Smaller groups formed from those sharing each of the new languages, and people began scattering from the city.

So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth. (Genesis 11:8-9)

Why Does It Matter?

Besides being a fascinating part of mankind's history, the biblical account of the events at Babel also answers some of the questions and problems of our day. It especially challenges certain evolutionary ideas and provides a reasonable explanation for the diversity in languages and people groups seen today.

Diversity of Languages

Perhaps the most obvious area explained by Babel is the origin of the various languages present in our world. While an evolutionary worldview might expect all languages to trace back to a single parent language (much like it claims all life traces back to one organism), that isn't what researchers have found. Instead, language families of today trace back to multiple unrelated parent languages-exactly what one would predict from the Babel account.

What Basis for Racism?

The evolutionary story of man's origins is inherently racist (because of its implications that some people groups are more evolutionarily advanced than others and, therefore, that the "lower" groups are more closely related to primates). However, the Bible's account of the events at Babel confirms that all people are descended from the groups split at Babel (who were all direct, recent descendants of Noah and, consequently, from the first humans-Adam and Eve-who were special, direct creations of God). There is no basis for racism as all people are related and comprise only one "race" of people made in the image of God. Therefore, they are all equal and all equally human.

Physical Differences Between People Groups

But why, then, do people from various parts of the world look so different from each other? The explanation for differences in physical appearance is simple. As the groups spread out and separated from each other after Babel, their gene pools were largely isolated-generally more so, the farther apart they were-and physical features such as certain skin shades or eye shapes gradually became dominant within each group. These distinctive features are still reflected in the diversity among people groups today. But far from evidence of evolution, these minor genetic differences (and they are minor-making up only a very small percentage of an individual's DNA) are the natural result of the loss of genetic variability that occurs when people groups are isolated from one another.

For more information related to the tower of Babel, check out these articles:

There exist a great many confirmations of the Bible's account of the tower of Babel and what happened as a result. Language changes, ziggurats, names of Noah found throughout the world, and tower legends are excellent confirmations of the events at Babel.

God's gentleness in judging the rebels at Babel is a lesson for us today. By changing one language into many, he separated nations more effectively than any Great Wall of China. God stepped in to prevent the human race from falling under the sway of a single, absolute tyrant over all the earth.

In their efforts to explain the multitude of languages, secular theories come up empty. They are upstaged by the biblical narrative, which credits God with the gift of language and the vast diversity of different language families. The words language, tongue, speech, and word appear in the Bible at least 1,401 times.

"Why do intellectually superior humans have around 7,000 distinct languages?" queries evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel. Pagel heads a team searching for an evolutionary explanation for our many languages. The biblical history of the dispersion from the tower of Babel indicates that diversity of language emerged from "a plain in the land of Shinar."

How did Native American peoples get to North America after the Flood reduced mankind to eight people in the mountains of Ararat?

Magazine Article

Many years ago a friend of mine said, in response to my biblical challenge to his theistic evolutionary ideas, 'If God didn't evolve us from apes, why did He make us to look so much like them?' I didn

Magazine Article

God's judgment of the Tower of Babel was one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of the world. In one moment, a massive, highly complex building project, involving the entire human race, came

Magazine Article

One of the great mysteries of life is the origin of language. We use it every day to communicate with each other, but how did it begin?

Praise the Lord we are able to take the creation/gospel message into other languages to restore the truth they once had and preach the true history of the world.

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The Tower of Babel, where God divided the languages, is the correct starting point for understanding the origin of language, culture, and the people groups.

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2200 B.C. to 1600 A.D.

Your notes:
1. Oral literature: epic narratives, creation myths, stories, poems, songs.

2. Use stories to teach moral lessons and convey practical information about the natural world.

3. Deep respect for nature and animals.

4. Cyclical worldview.

5. Figurative language/parallelism.

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The thoughts and perspectives of indigenous individuals, especially those who lived during the 15th through 19th centuries, have survived in written form less often than is optimal for the historian. Because such documents are extremely rare, those interested in the Native American past also draw information from traditional arts, folk literature, folklore, archaeology, and other sources.

Powhatan village of Secoton© North Wind Picture Archives

Native American history is made additionally complex by the diverse geographic and cultural backgrounds of the peoples involved. As one would expect, indigenous American farmers living in stratified societies, such as the Natchez, engaged with Europeans differently than did those who relied on hunting and gathering, such as the Apache. Likewise, Spanish conquistadors were engaged in a fundamentally different kind of colonial enterprise than were their counterparts from France or England.

The sections below consider broad trends in Native American history from the late 15th century to the late 20th century. More-recent events are considered in the final part of this article, Developments in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

North America and Europe circa 1492

The population of Native America

Scholarly estimates of the pre-Columbian population of Northern America have differed by millions of individuals: the lowest credible approximations propose that some 900,000 people lived north of the Rio Grande in 1492, and the highest posit some 18,000,000. In 1910 anthropologist James Mooney undertook the first thorough investigation of the problem. He estimated the precontact population density of each culture area based on historical accounts and carrying capacity, an estimate of the number of people who could be supported by a given form of subsistence. Mooney concluded that approximately 1,115,000 individuals lived in Northern America at the time of Columbian landfall. In 1934 A.L. Kroeber reanalyzed Mooney's work and estimated 900,000 individuals for the same region and period. In 1966 ethnohistorian Henry Dobyns estimated that there were between 9,800,000 and 12,200,000 people north of the Rio Grande before contact; in 1983 he revised that number upward to 18,000,000 people.

Dobyns was among the first scholars to seriously consider the effects of epidemic diseases on indigenous demographic change. He noted that, during the reliably recorded epidemics of the 19th century, introduced diseases such as smallpox had combined with various secondary effects (i.e., pneumonia and famine) to create mortality rates as high as 95 percent, and he suggested that earlier epidemics were similarly devastating. He then used this and other information to calculate from early census data backward to probable founding populations.

Dobyns's figures are among the highest proposed in the scholarly literature. Some of his critics fault Dobyns for the disjunctions between physical evidence and his results, as when the number of houses archaeologists find at a site suggests a smaller population than do his models of demographic recovery. Others, including the historian David Henige, criticize some of the assumptions Dobyns made in his analyses. For instance, many early fur traders noted the approximate number of warriors fielded by a tribe but neglected to mention the size of the general population. In such cases small changes in one's initial presumptions-in this example, the number of women, children, and elders represented by each warrior-can, when multiplied over several generations or centuries, create enormous differences in estimates of population.

A third group suggests that Dobyns's estimates may be too low because they do not account for pre-Columbian contact between Native Americans and Europeans. This group notes that severe epidemics of European diseases may have begun in North America in the late 10th or early 11th century, when the Norse briefly settled a region they called Vinland. The L'Anse aux Meadows site (on the island of Newfoundland), the archaeological remains of a small settlement, confirms the Norse presence in North America about 1000 ce. Given that sagas attest to an epidemic that struck Erik the Red's colony in Greenland at about the same time, the possibility that native peoples suffered from introduced diseases well before Columbian landfall must be considered.

Yet another group of demographers protest that an emphasis on population loss obscures the resilience shown by indigenous peoples in the face of conquest. Most common, however, is a middle position that acknowledges that demographic models of 15th-century Native America must be treated with caution, while also accepting that the direct and indirect effects of the European conquest included extraordinary levels of indigenous mortality not only from introduced diseases but also from battles, slave raids, and-for those displaced by these events-starvation and exposure. This perspective acknowledges both the resiliency of Native American peoples and cultures and the suffering they bore.

Native American ethnic and political diversity

Determining the number of ethnic and political groups in pre-Columbian Northern America is also problematic, not least because definitions of what constitutes an ethnic group or a polity vary with the questions one seeks to answer. Ethnicity is most frequently equated with some aspect of language, while social or political organization can occur on a number of scales simultaneously. Thus, a given set of people might be defined as an ethnic group through their use of a common dialect or language even as they are recognized as members of nested polities such as a clan, a village, and a confederation. Other factors, including geographic boundaries, a subsistence base that emphasized either foraging or farming, the presence or absence of a social or religious hierarchy, and the inclinations of colonial bureaucrats, among others, also affected ethnic and political classification; see Sidebar: The Difference Between a Tribe and a Band.

The cross-cutting relationships between ethnicity and political organization are complex today and were equally so in the past. Just as a contemporary speaker of a Germanic language-perhaps German or English-might self-identify as German, Austrian, English, Scottish, Irish, Australian, Canadian, American, South African, Jamaican, Indian, or any of a number of other nationalities, so might a pre-Columbian Iroquoian speaker have been a member of the Cayuga, Cherokee, Huron, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, or Tuscarora nation. And both the hypothetical Germanic speaker and the hypothetical Iroquoian speaker live or lived in nested polities or quasi-polities: families, neighbourhoods, towns, regions, and so forth, each of which has or had some level of autonomy in its dealings with the outside world. Recognizing that it is difficult to determine precisely how many ethnic or political groups or polities were present in 15th-century Northern America, most researchers favour relative rather than specific quantification of these entities.

The outstanding characteristic of North American Indian languages is their diversity-at contact Northern America was home to more than 50 language families comprising between 300 and 500 languages. At the same moment in history, western Europe had only 2 language families ( Indo-European and Uralic) and between 40 and 70 languages. In other words, if one follows scholarly conventions and defines ethnicity through language, Native America was vastly more diverse than Europe.

Politically, most indigenous American groups used consensus-based forms of organization. In such systems, leaders rose in response to a particular need rather than gaining some fixed degree of power. The Southeast Indians and the Northwest Coast Indians were exceptions to this general rule, as they most frequently lived in hierarchical societies with a clear chiefly class. Regardless of the form of organization, however, indigenous American polities were quite independent when compared with European communities of similar size.

European populations and polities

Just as Native American experiences during the early colonial period must be framed by an understanding of indigenous demography, ethnic diversity, and political organization, so must they be contextualized by the social, economic, political, and religious changes that were taking place in Europe at the time. These changes drove European expansionism and are often discussed as part of the centuries-long transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism ( see Western colonialism).

Many scholars hold that the events of the early colonial period are inextricably linked to the epidemics of the Black Death, or bubonic plague, that struck Europe between 1347 and 1400. Perhaps 25 million people, about one-third of the population, died during this epidemic. The population did not return to preplague levels until the early 1500s. The intervening period was a time of severe labour shortages that enabled commoners to demand wages for their work. Standards of living increased dramatically for a few generations, and some peasants were even able to buy small farms. These were radical changes from the previous era, during which most people had been tied to the land and a lord through serfdom.

Even as the general standard of living was improving, a series of military conflicts raged, including the Hundred Years' War, between France and England (1337-1453); the Wars of the Roses, between two English dynasties (1455-85); and the Reconquista, in which Roman Catholics fought to remove Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula (c. 718-1492). These conflicts created intense local and regional hardship, as the roving brigands that constituted the military typically commandeered whatever they wanted from the civilian population. In the theatres of war, troops were more or less free to take over private homes and to impress people into labour; famine, rape, and murder were all too prevalent in these areas. Further, tax revenues could not easily be levied on devastated regions, even though continued military expenditures had begun to drain the treasuries of western Europe.

As treasuries were depleted, overseas trade beckoned. The Ottoman Empire controlled the overland routes from Europe to South Asia, with its markets of spices and other commercially lucrative goods. Seeking to establish a sea route to the region, the Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator sponsored expeditions down the Atlantic coast of Africa. Later expeditions attempted to reach the Indian Ocean, but they were severely tested by the rough seas at the Cape of Good Hope. Christopher Columbus had been a member of several such voyages and proposed an alternative, transatlantic route; in 1484 he requested the sponsorship of John II, the king of Portugal, who refused to support an exploratory journey.

Iberia was a hotbed of activity at the time. Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castille had begun to unify their kingdoms through their 1469 marriage, but they were soon forced to resolve bitter challenges to their individual ascensions. Eventually quelling civil war, the devout Roman Catholic sovereigns initiated the final phase of the Reconquista, pitting their forces against the last Moorish stronghold, Grenada. The city fell in January 1492, an event Columbus reportedly witnessed.

The seemingly endless military and police actions to which Ferdinand and Isabella had been party had severely depleted their financial reserves. This situation was exacerbated by the chief inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, Tomás de Torquemada, who persuaded the monarchs to expel any Jews who refused to be baptized. Under his authority some 160,000-and by some accounts as many as 200,000-Jews were ultimately expelled or executed for heresy, including many of Spain's leading entrepreneurs, businessmen, and scientists. Having lost so many of its best minds, Spain faced a very slow economic recovery, if it was to recover at all. Seeking new sources of income, the royal treasurer, Luis de Santángel, urged the monarchs to accept Columbus's proposal to explore a western route to the East. Although Columbus did not find a route with which to sidestep Ottoman trade hegemony, his journey nonetheless opened the way to overseas wealth. Spain used American resources to restore its imperiled economy, a strategy that was soon adopted by the other maritime nations of Europe as well.

Spanish Inquisition Three Lions/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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Native American - Native American history

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Native American - Native American - Native American history: The thoughts and perspectives of indigenous individuals, especially those who lived during the 15th through 19th centuries, have survived in written form less often than is optimal for the historian.

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Estimates of how many Native American's there were in North American Prior to "Columbian times" range from 900,000 native people to 18,000,000 native people.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Native-American/Native-American-history

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Historian trying to number the tribes that exisited for enthic groups using language differences between tribes and found  for the 50 "language families" existed and more than 300-500 native languages were spoken by Native Americans in Northern America.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Native-American/Native-American-history

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Period / NA Literature Characteristics:

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On May 13, 1607 three English ships the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery with approximately 144 settlers and sailors, will land and plant the first permanent English colony in North America. Established by the Virginia Company of London this settlement would be called Jamestown, after king James I. On June 15, 1607 the fleet commander Captain Christopher Newport will return to England leaving 104 settlers. Taken from "The Proceedings - of the English Colony in Virginia since their First beginning form England in the Year of Our Lord 1606 till this Present 1612, with All their Accidents that befell them in their Journeys and Discoveries" the following is a list of the names of those known 104 settlers.

Adling (or Adding), Henry - Gentleman
Alicock (or Alikock), Jeremy (or Jerome) - Gentleman - died August 14, 1607
Archer, Gabriel - Captain, Gentleman - died Winter 1609-1610
Asbie, John - died August 6, 1607
Beast (or Best), Benjamin - Gentleman - died September 5, 1607
Behothland (or Behethand, Beheland), Robert - Gentleman - died 1628
Brinto (or Brinton), Edward - Mason, Soldier
Brookes, Edward - Gentleman - died April 7, 1607
Brookes, John - Gentleman
Browne, Edward - Gentleman - died August 15, 1607
Brunfield, James - Boy
Bruster (or Brewster), William - Gentleman - died August 10, 1607
Capper, John
Cassen (or Cawsen), George - Laborer - died December 1607
Cassen, Thomas - Laborer
Cassen, William - Laborer
Clovill, Ustis (or Eustace) - Gentleman - died June 7, 1607
Collier, Samuel - Boy - died 1622
Cooke, Roger - Gentleman
Cooper (or Cowper), Thomas - Barber
Crofts, Richard - Gentleman
Dixon, Richard - Gentleman
Dods, John - Laborer, Soldier
Emry, Thomas - Carpenter - died December 1607
Fenton, Robert - Gentleman
Flower (or Flowre), George - Gentleman - died August 9, 1607
Ford, Robert - Gentleman
Frith, Richard - Gentleman
Galthrope (or Halthrop, Calthrop), Stephen - Gentleman - died August 15, 1607
Garret, William - Bricklayer
Golding (or Goulding), George - Laborer
Gosnold (or Gosnoll), Anthony, (Cousin) - Gentleman - died January 7, 1609
Gosnold (or Gosnoll), Anthony, (Cousin) - Gentleman
Gosnold (or Gosnoll), Bartholomew - Captain, Councilor - died August 16, 1607
Gower (or Gore), Thomas - Gentleman - died August 16, 1607
Harrington, Edward - Gentleman - died August 24, 1607
Herd, John - Bricklayer
Houlgrave, Nicholas - Gentleman
Hunt, Robert - Master, Preacher, Gentleman - died before 1609
Jacob, Thomas - Sergeant - died September 4, 1607
Johnson, William - Laborer
Kendall, George - Captain, Councilor - died December 1, 1607
Kingston (or Kiniston), Ellis - Gentleman - died September 18, 1607
Laxton (or Laxon), William - Carpenter
Laydon, John - Laborer, Carpenter
Loue (or Love), William - Tailor, Soldier
Martin, John, (Senior), Captain, Councilor - died June 1632
Martin, John, (Junior), Gentleman - died August 18, 1607
Martin, George - Gentleman
Midwinter, Francis - Gentleman - died August 14, 1607
Morish (or Morris), Edward - Gentleman, Corporal - died August 14, 1607
Morton, Matthew - Sailor
Mounslie, Thomas - Laborer - died August 17, 1607
Mouton, Thomas - Gentleman - died September 19, 1607
Mutton, Richard - Boy
Peacock (or Peacocke, Pecock), Nathaniel - Boy
Penington, Robert - Gentleman - died August 18, 1607
Percy (or Percie, Percye), George - Master, Gentleman - died 1632
Pickhouse (or Piggas), Drue - Gentleman - died August 19, 1607
Posing (or Pising), Edward - Carpenter
Powell, Nathaniel - Gentleman - died March 22, 1622
Profit, Jonas - Fisherman
Ratcliffe (or Sicklemore), John - Captain, Councilor - died November 1609
Read, James - Blacksmith, Soldier - died March 13, 1622
Robinson, John (or Jehu) - Gentleman - died December 1607
Rods (or Rodes, Roods), William - Laborer - died August 27, 1607
Sands, Thomas - Gentleman
Short, John - Gentleman
Short, Edward - Laborer - died August 1607
Simons, Richard - Gentleman - died September 18, 1607
Skot (or Scot), Nicholas - Drummer
Small, Robert - Carpenter
Smethes, William - Gentleman
Smith (or Smyth), John - Captain, Councilor - died June 1631
Snarsbrough, Francis - Gentleman
Stevenson, John - Gentleman
Studley (or Stoodie), Thomas - Gentleman - died August 28, 1607
Tankard, William - Gentleman
Tavin (or Tauin), Henry - Laborer
Throgmorton (or Throgmortine), Kellam (or Kenelme) - Gentleman - died August 26, 1607
Todkill, Anas - Soldier
Vnger (or Unger), William - Laborer
Waller (or Waler), John - Gentleman - died August 24, 1607
Walker, George - Gentleman
Webbe, Thomas - Gentleman
White, William - Laborer
Wilkinson, William - Surgeon
Wingfield, Edward Maria - Master, Councilor President - died 1613
Wotton, Thomas - Gentleman, Surgeon, - died April 28, 1638

"With diverse others to the number of 105"

Mariners and others known to have been with the expedition that established Jamestown on May 13, 1607.

Browne, Oliver - Mariner
Clarke, Charles - Mariner
Collson (or Cotson), John - Mariner
Crookdeck, John - Mariner
Deale, Jeremy - Mariner
Fitch, Mathew - Mariner - died July 1609
Genoway, Richard - Mariner
Godword, Thomas - Mariner
Jackson, Robert - Mariner
Markham, Robert - Mariner
Nelson, Francys - Captain - died Winter 1612-1613
Poole, Jonas - Mariner - died 1612
Skynner, Thomas - Mariner
Turnbrydge (or Turbridge), Thomas - Mariner
Newport, Christopher - Captain, Councilor - died 1617
Tyndall, Robert - Mariner, Gunner
White, Benjamyn - Mariner
Danynell
Stephen

There were 144 persons in the expedition including those 104 who remained in Virginia.

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The First Residents of Jamestown - Historic Jamestowne Part of Colonial National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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On May 13, 1607 three English ships the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery with approximately 144 settlers and sailors, will land and plant the first permanent English colony in North America. Established by the Virginia Company of London this settlement would be called Jamestown, after king James I.

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1775-1783

The age of reasoning was between  1665 and 1815 this was the time period that lead to the advancement of litrature science and extra making way to the 19th century.

During this time period the bill of rights was produced revelotizing the way people lived and functioned for all races.

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Second war between america and Brian.
American settlers united with the indigenouse settelers. This later helped indefiones settelers achive independance.
from 1812 to 1815

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California had recently discovered gold causing there to be an influx of over thirty thousand people. Alot of gold was discovered and mined, but there were to many people causing there to be lack of space and problems.

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The California Gold Rush (1848-1855) was a gold rush that began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. The news of gold brought approximately 300,000 people to California from the rest of the United States and abroad. The sudden influx of gold into the money supply reinvigorated the American economy; the sudden population increase allowed California to go rapidly to statehood in the Compromise of 1850. The Gold Rush had severe effects on Native Californians and accelerated the Native American population's decline from disease, starvation and the California genocide.

The effects of the Gold Rush were substantial. Whole indigenous societies were attacked and pushed off their lands by the gold-seekers, called "forty-niners" (referring to 1849, the peak year for Gold Rush immigration). Outside of California, the first to arrive were from Oregon, the Sandwich Islands ( Hawaii) and Latin America in late 1848. Of the approximately 300,000 people who came to California during the Gold Rush, about half arrived by sea and half came overland on the California Trail and the Gila River trail; forty-niners often faced substantial hardships on the trip. While most of the newly arrived were Americans, the gold rush attracted thousands from Latin America, Europe, Australia and China. Agriculture and ranching expanded throughout the state to meet the needs of the settlers. San Francisco grew from a small settlement of about 200 residents in 1846 to a boomtown of about 36,000 by 1852. Roads, churches, schools and other towns were built throughout California. In 1849 a state constitution was written. The new constitution was adopted by referendum vote; the future state's interim first governor and legislature were chosen. In September 1850, California became a state.

At the beginning of the Gold Rush, there was no law regarding property rights in the goldfields and a system of "staking claims" was developed. Prospectors retrieved the gold from streams and riverbeds using simple techniques, such as panning. Although mining caused environmental harm, more sophisticated methods of gold recovery were developed and later adopted around the world. New methods of transportation developed as steamships came into regular service. By 1869, railroads were built from California to the eastern United States. At its peak, technological advances reached a point where significant financing was required, increasing the proportion of gold companies to individual miners. Gold worth tens of billions of today's US dollars was recovered, which led to great wealth for a few, though many who participated in the California Gold Rush earned little more than they had started with.

California goldfields (red) in the Sierra Nevada and northern California[image reference needed ]

Earlier discoveries

Gold was discovered in California as early as March 9, 1842, at Rancho San Francisco, in the mountains north of present-day Los Angeles. Californian native Francisco Lopez was searching for stray horses and stopped on the bank of a small creek (in today's Placerita Canyon), about 3 miles (4.8 km) east of present-day Newhall, California, and about 35 miles (56 km) northwest of L.A. While the horses grazed, Lopez dug up some wild onions and found a small gold nugget in the roots among the bulbs. He looked further and found more gold. Lopez took the gold to authorities who confirmed its worth. Lopez and others began to search for other streambeds with gold deposits in the area. They found several in the northeastern section of the forest, within present-day Ventura County. In November, some of the gold was sent to the U.S. Mint, although otherwise attracted little notice. In 1843, Lopez found gold in San Feliciano Canyon near his first discovery. Mexican miners from Sonora worked the placer deposits until 1846. Minor finds of gold in California were also made by Mission Indians prior to 1848. The friars instructed them to keep its location secret to avoid a gold rush.

Marshall's discovery

1855 illustration of James W. Marshall, discoverer of gold at Sutter's Mill

In January 1847, nine months into the Mexican-American War, the Treaty of Cahuenga was signed, leading to the resolution of the military conflict in Alta California (Upper California). On January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall found shiny metal in the tailrace of a lumber mill he was building for Sacramento pioneer John Sutter-known as Sutter's Mill, near Coloma on the American River. Marshall brought what he found to Sutter, and the two privately tested the metal. After the tests showed that it was gold, Sutter expressed dismay, wanting to keep the news quiet because he feared what would happen to his plans for an agricultural empire if there were a gold rush in the region. The Mexican-American War ended on May 30 with the ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which formally transferred California to the United States.

Having sworn all concerned at the mill to secrecy, in February 1848, Sutter sent Charles Bennett to Monterey to meet with Colonel Mason, the chief U.S. official in California, to secure the mineral rights of the land where the mill stood. Bennett was not to tell anyone of the discovery of gold, but when he stopped at Benicia, he heard talk about the discovery of coal near Mount Diablo, and he blurted out the discovery of gold. He continued to San Francisco, where again, he could not keep the secret. At Monterey, Mason declined to make any judgement of title to lands and mineral rights, and Bennett for the third time revealed the gold discovery.

By March 1848, rumors of the discovery were confirmed by San Francisco newspaper publisher and merchant Samuel Brannan. Brannan hurriedly set up a store to sell gold prospecting supplies, and he walked through the streets of San Francisco, holding aloft a vial of gold, shouting "Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!"

On August 19, 1848, the New York Herald was the first major newspaper on the East Coast to report the discovery of gold. On December 5, 1848, US President James K. Polk confirmed the discovery of gold in an address to Congress. As a result, individuals seeking to benefit from the gold rush-later called the "forty-niners"-began moving to the Gold Country of California or "Mother Lode" from other countries and from other parts of the United States. As Sutter had feared, his business plans were ruined after his workers left in search of gold, and squatters took over his land and stole his crops and cattle.

San Francisco had been a tiny settlement before the rush began. When residents learned about the discovery, it at first became a ghost town of abandoned ships and businesses, but then boomed as merchants and new people arrived. The population of San Francisco increased quickly from about 1,000 in 1848 to 25,000 full-time residents by 1850. Miners lived in tents, wood shanties, or deck cabins removed from abandoned ships.

Transportation and supplies

Advertisement about sailing to California, c. 1850

In what has been referred to as the "first world-class gold rush," there was no easy way to get to California; forty-niners faced hardship and often death on the way. At first, most Argonauts, as they were also known, traveled by sea. From the East Coast, a sailing voyage around the tip of South America would take four to five months, and cover approximately 18,000 nautical miles (21,000 mi; 33,000 km). An alternative was to sail to the Atlantic side of the Isthmus of Panama, take canoes and mules for a week through the jungle, and then on the Pacific side, wait for a ship sailing for San Francisco. There was also a route across Mexico starting at Veracruz. The companies providing such transportation created vast wealth among their owners and included the U.S. Mail Steamship Company, the federally subsidized Pacific Mail Steamship Company, and the Accessory Transit Company. Many gold-seekers took the overland route across the continental United States, particularly along the California Trail. Each of these routes had its own deadly hazards, from shipwreck to typhoid fever and cholera. In the early years of the rush, much of the population growth in the San Francisco area was due to steamship travel from New York City through overland portages in Nicaragua and Panama and then back up by steamship to San Francisco.

While traveling, many steamships from the eastern seaboard required the passengers to bring kits, which were typically full of personal belongings such as clothes, guidebooks, tools, etc. In addition to personal belongings, Argonauts were required to bring barrels full of beef, biscuits, butter, pork, rice, and salt. While on the steamships, travelers could talk to each other, smoke, fish, and other activities depending on the ship they traveled. Still, the dominant activity held throughout the steamships was gambling, which was ironic because segregation between wealth gaps was prominent throughout the ships. Everything was segregated between the rich vs. the poor. There were different levels of travel one could pay for to get to California. The cheaper steamships tended to have longer routes. In contrast, the more expensive would get passengers to California quicker. There were clear social and economic distinctions between those who traveled together, being that those who spent more money would receive accommodations that others were not allowed. They would do this with the clear intent to distinguish their higher class power over those that could not afford those accommodations.

Merchant ships fill San Francisco Bay, 1850-51

Supply ships arrived in San Francisco with goods to supply the needs of the growing population. When hundreds of ships were abandoned after their crews deserted to go into the goldfields, many ships were converted to warehouses, stores, taverns, hotels, and one into a jail. As the city expanded and new places were needed on which to build, many ships were destroyed and used as landfill.

Other developments

Within a few years, there was an important but lesser-known surge of prospectors into far Northern California, specifically into present-day Siskiyou, Shasta and Trinity Counties. Discovery of gold nuggets at the site of present-day Yreka in 1851 brought thousands of gold-seekers up the Siskiyou Trail and throughout California's northern counties.

Settlements of the Gold Rush era, such as Portuguese Flat on the Sacramento River, sprang into existence and then faded. The Gold Rush town of Weaverville on the Trinity River today retains the oldest continuously used Taoist temple in California, a legacy of Chinese miners who came. While there are not many Gold Rush era ghost towns still in existence, the remains of the once-bustling town of Shasta have been preserved in a California State Historic Park in Northern California.

By 1850, most of the easily accessible gold had been collected, and attention turned to extracting gold from more difficult locations. Faced with gold increasingly difficult to retrieve, Americans began to drive out foreigners to get at the most accessible gold that remained. The new California State Legislature passed a foreign miners tax of twenty dollars per month ($700 per month as of 2023), and American prospectors began organized attacks on foreign miners, particularly Latin Americans and Chinese.

In addition, the huge numbers of newcomers were driving Native Americans out of their traditional hunting, fishing and food-gathering areas. To protect their homes and livelihood, some Native Americans responded by attacking the miners. This provoked counter-attacks on native villages. The Native Americans, out-gunned, were often slaughtered. Those who escaped massacres were many times unable to survive without access to their food-gathering areas, and they starved to death. Novelist and poet Joaquin Miller vividly captured one such attack in his semi-autobiographical work, Life Amongst the Modocs.

Forty-niners

The first people to rush to the goldfields, beginning in the spring of 1848, were the residents of California themselves-primarily agriculturally oriented Americans and Europeans living in Northern California, along with Native Californians and some Californios ( Spanish-speaking Californians; at the time, commonly referred to in English as simply 'Californians'). These first miners tended to be families in which everyone helped in the effort. Women and children of all ethnicities were often found panning next to the men. Some enterprising families set up boarding houses to accommodate the influx of men; in such cases, the women often brought in steady income while their husbands searched for gold.

Word of the Gold Rush spread slowly at first. The earliest gold-seekers were people who lived near California or people who heard the news from ships on the fastest sailing routes from California. The first large group of Americans to arrive were several thousand Oregonians who came down the Siskiyou Trail. Next came people from the Sandwich Islands, and several thousand Latin Americans, including people from Mexico, from Peru and from as far away as Chile, both by ship and overland. By the end of 1848, some 6,000 Argonauts had come to California.

Only a small number (probably fewer than 500) traveled overland from the United States that year. Some of these "forty-eighters", as the earliest gold-seekers were sometimes called, were able to collect large amounts of easily accessible gold-in some cases, thousands of dollars worth each day. Even ordinary prospectors averaged daily gold finds worth 10 to 15 times the daily wage of a laborer on the East Coast. A person could work for six months in the goldfields and find the equivalent of six years' wages back home. Some hoped to get rich quick and return home, and others wished to start businesses in California.

"Independent Gold Hunter on His Way to California", c. 1850[b]

By the beginning of 1849, word of the Gold Rush had spread around the world, and an overwhelming number of gold-seekers and merchants began to arrive from virtually every continent. The largest group of forty-niners in 1849 were Americans, arriving by the tens of thousands overland across the continent and along various sailing routes (the name "forty-niner" was derived from the year 1849). Many from the East Coast negotiated a crossing of the Appalachian Mountains, taking to riverboats in Pennsylvania, poling the keelboats to Missouri River wagon train assembly ports, and then traveling in a wagon train along the California Trail. Many others came by way of the Isthmus of Panama and the steamships of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. Australians and New Zealanders picked up the news from ships carrying Hawaiian newspapers, and thousands, infected with "gold fever", boarded ships for California.

Forty-niners came from Latin America, particularly from the Mexican mining districts near Sonora and Chile. Gold-seekers and merchants from Asia, primarily from China, began arriving in 1849, at first in modest numbers to Gum San (" Gold Mountain"), the name given to California in Chinese. The first immigrants from Europe, reeling from the effects of the Revolutions of 1848 and with a longer distance to travel, began arriving in late 1849, mostly from France, with some Germans, Italians, and Britons.

It is estimated that approximately 90,000 people arrived in California in 1849-about half by land and half by sea. Of these, perhaps 50,000 to 60,000 were Americans, and the rest were from other countries. By 1855, it is estimated at least 300,000 gold-seekers, merchants, and other immigrants had arrived in California from around the world. The largest group continued to be Americans, but there were tens of thousands each of Mexicans, Chinese, Britons, Australians, French, and Latin Americans, together with many smaller groups of miners, such as African Americans, Filipinos, Basques and Turks.

People from small villages in the hills near Genova, Italy were among the first to settle permanently in the Sierra Nevada foothills; they brought with them traditional agricultural skills, developed to survive cold winters. A modest number of miners of African ancestry (probably less than 4,000) had come from the Southern States, the Caribbean and Brazil.

A number of immigrants were from China. Several hundred Chinese arrived in California in 1849 and 1850, and in 1852 more than 20,000 landed in San Francisco. Their distinctive dress and appearance was highly recognizable in the goldfields. Chinese miners suffered enormously, enduring violent racism from white miners who aimed their frustrations at foreigners. Further animosity toward the Chinese led to legislation such as the Chinese Exclusion Act and Foreign Miners Tax.

There were also women in the Gold Rush. However, their numbers were small. Of the 40,000 people who arrived by ship to the San Francisco Bay in 1849, only 700 were women (including those who were poor, wealthy, entrepreneurs, prostitutes, single, and married). They were of various ethnicities including Anglo-American, African-American, Hispanic, Native, European, Chinese, and Jewish. The reasons they came varied: some came with their husbands, refusing to be left behind to fend for themselves, some came because their husbands sent for them, and others came (singles and widows) for the adventure and economic opportunities. On the trail many people died from accidents, cholera, fever, and myriad other causes, and many women became widows before even setting eyes on California. While in California, women became widows quite frequently due to mining accidents, disease, or mining disputes of their husbands. Life in the goldfields offered opportunities for women to break from their traditional work.

Legal rights

Joaquín Murrieta, called the "Robin Hood of California", was a notorious outlaw during the Gold Rush.

When the Gold Rush began, the California goldfields were peculiarly lawless places. When gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill, California was still technically part of Mexico, under American military occupation as the result of the Mexican-American War. With the signing of the treaty ending the war on February 2, 1848, California became a possession of the United States, but it was not a formal " territory" and did not become a state until September 9, 1850. California existed in the unusual condition of a region under military control. There was no civil legislature, executive or judicial body for the entire region. Local residents operated under a confusing and changing mixture of Mexican rules, American principles, and personal dictates. Lax enforcement of federal laws, such as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, encouraged the arrival of free blacks and escaped slaves.

While the treaty ending the Mexican-American War obliged the United States to honor Mexican land grants, almost all the goldfields were outside those grants. Instead, the goldfields were primarily on " public land", meaning land formally owned by the United States government. However, there were no legal rules yet in place, and no practical enforcement mechanisms.

The benefit to the forty-niners was that the gold was simply "free for the taking" at first. In the goldfields at the beginning, there was no private property, no licensing fees, and no taxes. The miners informally adapted Mexican mining law that had existed in California. For example, the rules attempted to balance the rights of early arrivers at a site with later arrivers; a " claim" could be "staked" by a prospector, but that claim was valid only as long as it was being actively worked.

Miners worked at a claim only long enough to determine its potential. If a claim was deemed as low-value-as most were-miners would abandon the site in search of a better one. In the case where a claim was abandoned or not worked upon, other miners would "claim-jump" the land. "Claim-jumping" meant that a miner began work on a previously claimed site. Disputes were often handled personally and violently, and were sometimes addressed by groups of prospectors acting as arbitrators. This often led to heightened ethnic tensions. In some areas the influx of many prospectors could lead to a reduction of the existing claim size by simple pressure.

Development of gold-recovery techniques

Approximately four hundred million years ago, California lay at the bottom of a large sea; underwater volcanoes deposited lava and minerals (including gold) onto the sea floor. By tectonic forces these minerals and rocks came to the surface of the Sierra Nevada, and eroded. Water carried the exposed gold downstream and deposited it in quiet gravel beds along the sides of old rivers and streams. The forty-niners first focused their efforts on these deposits of gold.

Because the gold in the California gravel beds was so richly concentrated, early forty-niners were able to retrieve loose gold flakes and nuggets with their hands, or simply " pan" for gold in rivers and streams. Panning cannot take place on a large scale, and industrious miners and groups of miners graduated to placer mining, using " cradles" and "rockers" or "long-toms" to process larger volumes of gravel. Miners would also engage in "coyoteing", a method that involved digging a shaft 6 to 13 metres (20 to 43 ft) deep into placer deposits along a stream. Tunnels were then dug in all directions to reach the richest veins of pay dirt.

In the most complex placer mining, groups of prospectors would divert the water from an entire river into a sluice alongside the river and then dig for gold in the newly exposed river bottom. Modern estimates are that as much as 12 million ounces (370 t) of gold were removed in the first five years of the Gold Rush.

In the next stage, by 1853, hydraulic mining was used on ancient gold-bearing gravel beds on hillsides and bluffs in the goldfields. In a modern style of hydraulic mining first developed in California, and later used around the world, a high-pressure hose directed a powerful stream or jet of water at gold-bearing gravel beds. The loosened gravel and gold would then pass over sluices, with the gold settling to the bottom where it was collected. By the mid-1880s, it is estimated that 11 million ounces (340 t) of gold (worth approximately US$15 billion at December 2010 prices) had been recovered by hydraulic mining.

A byproduct of these extraction methods was that large amounts of gravel, silt, heavy metals, and other pollutants went into streams and rivers. As of 1999 many areas still bear the scars of hydraulic mining, since the resulting exposed earth and downstream gravel deposits do not support plant life.

After the Gold Rush had concluded, gold recovery operations continued. The final stage to recover loose gold was to prospect for gold that had slowly washed down into the flat river bottoms and sandbars of California's Central Valley and other gold-bearing areas of California (such as Scott Valley in Siskiyou County). By the late 1890s, dredging technology (also invented in California) had become economical, and it is estimated that more than 20 million ounces (620 t) were recovered by dredging.

Both during the Gold Rush and in the decades that followed, gold-seekers also engaged in "hard-rock" mining, extracting the gold directly from the rock that contained it (typically quartz), usually by digging and blasting to follow and remove veins of the gold-bearing quartz. Once the gold-bearing rocks were brought to the surface, the rocks were crushed and the gold separated, either using separation in water, using its density difference from quartz sand, or by washing the sand over copper plates coated with mercury (with which gold forms an amalgam). Loss of mercury in the amalgamation process was a source of environmental contamination. Eventually, hard-rock mining became the single largest source of gold produced in the Gold Country. The total production of gold in California from then until now is estimated at 118 million ounces (3,700 t).

Image gallery

Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush. The wealthiest man in California during the early years of the rush was Samuel Brannan, a tireless self-promoter, shopkeeper and newspaper publisher. Brannan opened the first supply stores in Sacramento, Coloma, and other spots in the goldfields. Just as the rush began he purchased all the prospecting supplies available in San Francisco and re-sold them at a substantial profit.

Some gold-seekers made a significant amount of money. On average, half the gold-seekers made a modest profit, after taking all expenses into account; economic historians have suggested that white miners were more successful than black, Indian, or Chinese miners. However, taxes such as the California foreign miners tax passed in 1851, targeted mainly Latino miners and kept them from making as much money as whites, who did not have any taxes imposed on them. In California most late arrivals made little or wound up losing money. Similarly, many unlucky merchants set up in settlements that disappeared, or which succumbed to one of the calamitous fires that swept the towns that sprang up. By contrast, a businessman who went on to great success was Levi Strauss, who first began selling denim overalls in San Francisco in 1853.

Other businessmen reaped great rewards in retail, shipping, entertainment, lodging, or transportation. Boardinghouses, food preparation, sewing, and laundry were highly profitable businesses often run by women (married, single, or widowed) who realized men would pay well for a service done by a woman. Brothels also brought in large profits, especially when combined with saloons and gaming houses.

By 1855, the economic climate had changed dramatically. Gold could be retrieved profitably from the goldfields only by medium to large groups of workers, either in partnerships or as employees. By the mid-1850s, it was the owners of these gold-mining companies who made the money. Also, the population and economy of California had become large and diverse enough that money could be made in a wide variety of conventional businesses.

Path of the gold

Portsmouth Square, San Francisco, during the Gold Rush, 1851

Once extracted, the gold itself took many paths. First, much of the gold was used locally to purchase food, supplies and lodging for the miners. It also went towards entertainment, which consisted of anything from a traveling theater to alcohol, gambling, and prostitutes. These transactions often took place using the recently recovered gold, carefully weighed out. These merchants and vendors, in turn, used the gold to purchase supplies from ship captains or packers bringing goods to California.

The gold then left California aboard ships or mules to go to the makers of the goods from around the world. A second path was the Argonauts themselves who, having personally acquired a sufficient amount, sent the gold home, or returned home taking with them their hard-earned "diggings". For example, one estimate is that some US$80 million worth of California gold (equivalent to US$2.5 billion today) was sent to France by French prospectors and merchants.

A majority of the gold went back to New York City brokerage houses.

As the Gold Rush progressed, local banks and gold dealers issued "banknotes" or "drafts"-locally accepted paper currency-in exchange for gold, and private mints created private gold coins. With the building of the San Francisco Mint in 1854, gold bullion was turned into official United States gold coins for circulation. The gold was also later sent by California banks to U.S. national banks in exchange for national paper currency to be used in the booming California economy.

1852 photograph, captioned "The Heathen Chinee Prospecting", indicating prejudice against Chinese gold miners

The arrival of hundreds of thousands of new people in California within a few years, compared to a population of some 15,000 Europeans and Californios beforehand, had many dramatic effects.

A 2017 study attributes the record-long economic expansion of the United States in the recession-free period of 1841-1856 primarily to "a boom in transportation-goods investment following the discovery of gold in California."

Government and commerce

The Gold Rush propelled California from a sleepy, little-known backwater to a center of the global imagination and the destination of hundreds of thousands of people. The new immigrants often showed remarkable inventiveness and civic mindedness. For example, in the midst of the Gold Rush, towns and cities were chartered, a state constitutional convention was convened, a state constitution written, elections held, and representatives sent to Washington, D.C. to negotiate the admission of California as a state.

Large-scale agriculture (California's second "Gold Rush") began during this time. Roads, schools, churches, and civic organizations quickly came into existence. The vast majority of the immigrants were Americans. Pressure grew for better communications and political connections to the rest of the United States, leading to statehood for California on September 9, 1850, in the Compromise of 1850 as the 31st state of the United States.

Between 1847 and 1870, the population of San Francisco increased from 500 to 150,000. The Gold Rush wealth and population increase led to significantly improved transportation between California and the East Coast. The Panama Railway, spanning the Isthmus of Panama, was finished in 1855. Steamships, including those owned by the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, began regular service from San Francisco to Panama, where passengers, goods and mail would take the train across the Isthmus and board steamships headed to the East Coast. One ill-fated journey, that of the S.S. Central America, ended in disaster as the ship sank in a hurricane off the coast of the Carolinas in 1857, with approximately three tons of California gold aboard.

Native Americans

Protecting the Settlers, an illustration by JR Browne for his work The Indians of California (1864)

The human and environmental costs of the Gold Rush were substantial. Native Americans, dependent on traditional hunting, gathering and agriculture, became the victims of starvation and disease, as gravel, silt and toxic chemicals from prospecting operations killed fish and destroyed habitats. The surge in the mining population also resulted in the disappearance of game and food gathering locales as gold camps and other settlements were built amidst them. Later farming spread to supply the settlers' camps, taking more land away from the Native Americans.

In some areas, systematic attacks against tribespeople in or near mining districts occurred. Various conflicts were fought between natives and settlers. Miners often saw Native Americans as impediments to their mining activities. Ed Allen, interpretive lead for Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park, reported that there were times when miners would kill up to 50 or more Natives in one day. Retribution attacks on solitary miners could result in larger scale attacks against Native populations, at times tribes or villages not involved in the original act. During the 1852 Bridge Gulch Massacre, a group of settlers attacked a band of Wintu Indians in response to the killing of a citizen named J. R. Anderson. After his killing, the sheriff led a group of men to track down the Indians, whom the men then attacked. Only three children survived the massacre that was against a different band of Wintu than the one that had killed Anderson.

Historian Benjamin Madley recorded the numbers of killings of California Indians between 1846 and 1873 and estimated that during this period at least 9,400 to 16,000 California Indians were killed by non-Indians, mostly occurring in more than 370 massacres (defined as the "intentional killing of five or more disarmed combatants or largely unarmed noncombatants, including women, children, and prisoners, whether in the context of a battle or otherwise"). According to demographer Russell Thornton, between 1849 and 1890, the Indigenous population of California fell below 20,000 - primarily because of the killings. According to the government of California, some 4,500 Native Americans suffered violent deaths between 1849 and 1870. Furthermore, California stood in opposition of ratifying the eighteen treaties signed between tribal leaders and federal agents in 1851. The state government, in support of miner activities funded and supported death squads, appropriating over 1 million dollars towards the funding and operation of the paramilitary organizations. Peter Burnett, California's first governor declared that California was a battleground between the races and that there were only two options towards California Indians, extermination or removal. "That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expected. While we cannot anticipate the result with but painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power and wisdom of man to avert." For Burnett, like many of his contemporaries, the genocide was part of God's plan, and it was necessary for Burnett's constituency to move forward in California. The Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, passed on April 22, 1850, by the California Legislature, allowed settlers to capture and use Native people as bonded workers, prohibited Native peoples' testimony against settlers, and allowed the adoption of Native children by settlers, often for labor purposes.

After the initial boom had ended, explicitly anti-foreign and racist attacks, laws and confiscatory taxes sought to drive out foreigners-in addition to Native Americans-from the mines, especially the Chinese and Latin American immigrants mostly from Sonora, Mexico and Chile. The toll on the American immigrants was severe as well: one in twelve forty-niners perished, as the death and crime rates during the Gold Rush were extraordinarily high, and the resulting vigilantism also took its toll.

World-wide economic stimulation

The Gold Rush stimulated economies around the world as well. Farmers in Chile, Australia, and Hawaii found a huge new market for their food; British manufactured goods were in high demand; clothing and even prefabricated houses arrived from China. The return of large amounts of California gold to pay for these goods raised prices and stimulated investment and the creation of jobs around the world. Australian prospector Edward Hargraves, noting similarities between the geography of California and his home country, returned to Australia to discover gold and spark the Australian gold rushes. Preceding the Gold Rush, the United States was on a bi-metallic standard, but the sudden increase in physical gold supply increased the relative value of physical silver and drove silver money from circulation. The increase in gold supply also created a monetary supply shock.

Within a few years after the end of the Gold Rush, in 1863, the groundbreaking ceremony for the western leg of the First transcontinental railroad was held in Sacramento. The line's completion, some six years later, financed in part with Gold Rush money, united California with the central and eastern United States. Travel that had taken weeks or even months could now be accomplished in days.

Gender practices

As the California Gold Rush brought a disproportionate population of men and set an environment of experimental lawlessness separate from the bounds of standard society, conventional American gender roles came into question. In the large absence of women, these migrant young men were made to reorganize their social and sexual practices, leading to cross-gender practices that most often took place as cross-dressing. Dance events were a notable social space for cross-dressing, where a piece of cloth (such as a handkerchief or sackcloth patch) would denote a 'woman.' Beyond social events, these subverted gender expectations continued into domestic duties as well. Though cross-dressing occurred most frequently with men as women, the reverse also applied.

These miners and merchants of various genders and gendered appearances, encouraged by the social fluidity and population limitations of the Wild West, shaped the beginnings of San Francisco's prominent queer history.

Longer-term

California's name became indelibly connected with the Gold Rush, and fast success in a new world became known as the "California Dream." California was perceived as a place of new beginnings, where great wealth could reward hard work and good luck. Historian H. W. Brands noted that in the years after the Gold Rush, the California Dream spread across the nation:

The old American Dream ... was the dream of the Puritans, of Benjamin Franklin's "Poor Richard"... of men and women content to accumulate their modest fortunes a little at a time, year by year by year. The new dream was the dream of instant wealth, won in a twinkling by audacity and good luck. [This] golden dream ... became a prominent part of the American psyche only after Sutter's Mill.

Overnight California gained the international reputation as the "golden state". Generations of immigrants have been attracted by the California Dream. California farmers, oil drillers, movie makers, airplane builders, computer and microchip makers, and "dot-com" entrepreneurs have each had their boom times in the decades after the Gold Rush.

In addition, the standard route shield of state highways in California is in the shape of a miner's spade to honor the California Gold Rush. Today, the aptly named State Route 49 travels through the Sierra Nevada foothills, connecting many Gold Rush-era towns such as Placerville, Auburn, Grass Valley, Nevada City, Coloma, Jackson, and Sonora. This state highway also passes very near Columbia State Historic Park, a protected area encompassing the historic business district of the town of Columbia; the park has preserved many Gold Rush-era buildings, which are presently occupied by tourist-oriented businesses.

Cultural references

The literary history of the Gold Rush is reflected in the works of Mark Twain (The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County), Bret Harte ( A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready), Joaquin Miller ( Life Amongst the Modocs), and many others.

References

Footnotes

Citations

Works cited

Bancroft, Hubert Howe (1888). The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft. Vol. XXIII: History of California: 1848-1859. San Francisco: The History Company - via Internet Archive.

Brands, H. W. (2002). The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream. New York: Anchor Books. ISBN 0-385-50216-8.

Clappe, Louise Amelia Knapp Smith (1922). The Shirley Letters from the California Mines, 1851-1852. San Francisco: T.C. Russell.

Clay, Karen; Gavin Wright (April 2005). "Order Without Law? Property Rights During the California Gold Rush" (PDF). Explorations in Economic History. 42 (2): 155-183. doi:10.1016/j.eeh.2004.05.003. Archived from the original (PDF) on August 9, 2017.

Cossley-Batt, Jill L. (1928). The Last of the California Rangers. New York and London: Funk & Wagnalls Company.

Faragher, John Mack (2006). Out of Many: A History of the American People (5th ed.). Pearson. p. 411.

Gaither, Chris; Chmielewski, Dawn C. (October 10, 2006). "Google Bets Big on Videos" (PDF). Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original (PDF) on June 16, 2007.

Holliday, J. S. (1999). Rush for Riches: Gold Fever and the Making of California. Oakland, California, Berkeley and Los Angeles: Oakland Museum of California and University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-21401-9.

Miller, Joaquin (1874). Life Amongst the Modocs. Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company.

Norton, Jack (1979). Genocide in Northwestern California: When Our Worlds Cried. San Francisco: Indian Historian Press.

Paul, Rodman W. (1969) [1947]. California Gold: The Beginning of Mining in the Far West. Bison: University of Nebraska Press.

Rolle, Andrew (1987) [1963]. California: A History (4th ed.). Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson. ISBN 0-88295-839-9. OCLC 13333829.

Starr, Kevin (1973). Americans and the California Dream: 1850-1915. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-504233-7.

Thornton, Russell (1987). American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492. Norman : University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0-8061-2074-4.

Watson, Matthew A. (2005). "The Argonauts of '49: Class, Gender, and Partnership in Bret Harte's West". Western American Literature. 40 (1): 33-53. doi:10.1353/wal.2005.0076. S2CID 165279197.

Wells, Harry L. (1881). History of Siskiyou County, California. Oakland, California: D.J. Stewart & Co.

Further reading

Burchell, Robert A. (Summer 1974). "The Loss of a Reputation; or, The Image of California in Britain before 1875". California Historical Quarterly. 53 (3): 115-130. doi:10.2307/25157500. ISSN 0097-6059. JSTOR 25157500.

Durham, Walter T. (1997). Volunteer Forty-Niners: Tennesseans and the California Gold Rush. Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press. ISBN 978-0585170930. OCLC 44959444.

Helper, Hinton Rowan (1855). The Land of Gold: Reality Versus Fiction. Baltimore: H. Taylor.

Holliday, J. S.; Swain, William (2002) [1981]. The World Rushed in: The California Gold Rush Experience. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0806134642.

Ngai, Mae. The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (2021), Mid 19c in California, Australia and South Africa

online edition Archived December 23, 2019, at the Wayback Machine

Watson, Matthew A. (2005). "The Argonauts of '49: Class, Gender, and Partnership in Bret Harte's West". Western American Literature. 40 (1): 33-53. ISSN 0043-3462.

Witschi, N. S. (2004). "Bret Harte." Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. Ed. Jay Parini. New York: Oxford University Press. 154-157.

Witschi, N.S. (2002). Traces of Gold: California's Natural Resources and the Claim to Realism in Western American Literature. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. ISBN 978-0817311179.

External links

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The California Gold Rush (1848-1855) was a gold rush that began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. The news of gold brought approximately 300,000 people to California from the rest of the United States and abroad.

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Before this time the america only ever had a agricultural economy.
Steam power helped industrialize the revelation .
With out steam power products wouldnt be able to be transfered and produced as quick.

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During this time period poets and authors revolutionized the way they wrote expressing more emotions. During that time period there was economic boom causing people to be happier, leading to more emotions.

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(1840-1860)
Transcendentalism:is a 19th-century movement of writers and philosophers in New England.

Famous works of art and literature were produced during this time period such as little woman written by Teressa may Alcott.

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The Salem which tries occurred during the end of the sixteenth century. May people accused one another of witch craft leanding to widespread hystirea and mass casualtiys.

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Nathaniel Hawthorn was an american Author during the late 16th centenary who was best known for his dark writing.

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famous authors of the 1800s and their work.

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famous authors of the 1800s and their work.

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Jane Austin:  was an English novelist best known for Her book pride and Prejudice.

Robert Burns:Was an American critter, he is famous for using small I dead to make light of something big. He also was one of the first comedic writers.

Lewis Carroll: was English written who wrote Alice in wonderland one of the biggest novels in history.

Emily Bronte:  English Novelist, she only ever wrote one literary pice (Wuthering Heights).

William Blake : Was both a poet and an artist, best known for his works during the romanticism age.

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McCarthyism: was the the time period in which Joseph McCarthy investigated communist infiltration in to the USA.

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Anne Bradstreet was a famous American/european author who was born in England (1612) and died in America(1672)
she was married and had six children.
her famous works of literature was her poems to her husband and poems of meditation.

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Robert Frost was a American poet who first became famous in Europe before publishing in the United states.  His more famous pies of work include fire and ice, and the road not taken. Robert had a wife and six children.

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Theodor Seuss Geisel or Dr Seuss ( his better known name) is an incredibly famous poet. Most famous for his children books, and simple form of poetry. Although he is dead their are many movies and children books based on his poetry, such as Green eggs and ham or the cat in the hat. Dr Seuss is well known across the world and has made many a Childs bed time story special.

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Realism means to present art literature poetry or another subject Mater in true light.  The period of realism lasted between the 1850s and the 1900s. many historical events happened between this time and many great authors and poets were born during this time. For example the civil war and mark twain.

- Mark twain was one of my favorite authors writing one of my all time favorite novels. ( huckleberry Fin). This book was about a young boy who lost his mother and lived with his drunk father. His father was a very abussive man so he fakes his own death and runs away. He then meats a slave and they become friends. they go on adventures together and Huck helps him find freedom. This book was a great example of realism because it does not try skew and deviate historical acuracy. It shows us the steam boat which at the time was a great invention and one of the only ways of transportation across a large body of water( the Mississippi river). It also shows us the harsh life of slaves and how they were treated. This book was pre civil war so slavery was still going on although northern states did not agree with is so that's why in the book the slave has to travel north.

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week 21

Mark twain was an American Author who lived during the period of realism which I have talked about before. he was born in 1835 and died in 1910.
Mark twain was not his real name but rather his pen name. His real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
Mark usually wrote books on adventure and always kept his books true and historical accurate.
His most famous pice of writings are the adventures of huckleberry fin, and the Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
For such a great writer Mark twain dropped out  of school and taught himself. He was a great self educated.

https://www.discoverwalks.com/blog/united-states/top-10-facts-about-mark-twain/

Top 10 Facts about Mark Twain - Discover Walks Blog
https://www.discoverwalks.com › Home › Articles

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Top 10 Facts about Mark Twain

His given name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, but he chose Mark Twain as his pen name.

Twain went to be one of the greatest American authors and humorists of the late 19 th and early 20 th century.

Many people are familiar with his work and loved his stories but few know the details of his personal life.

One of his most popular works is the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. His quotes are also famous and have been retold over the centuries.

Twain wrote more than a dozen novels and several short stories as well as essays. Other than writing, Twain loved his cats, was innovative, among many other things.

Mark Twain is popularly considered to be the father of American literature. Here are the top 10 facts about Mark Twain.

1. He was born in the town of Florida, Missouri

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, in tiny Florida, Missouri. He was a preterm baby and was sickly until his 7 th birthday.

Twain had seven siblings; he was the second last child. Sadly, only three of them survived to adulthood.

His father was a self-educated lawyer who also owned a general store. When Twain was about 5 years old, they moved to Hannibal, Missouri for better opportunities.

A few years later, his father died of pneumonia at 49 years.

2. Just like a cat, Mark Twain had nine lives

One obvious thing is that Twain loved cats. One time, he hired two cats to keep him company as he worked on his writing.

His father moved the family to Hannibal, Missouri, a town by the Mississippi River. Twain loved to play in the water but did not know how to swim.

He was saved from drowning in the Mississippi River nine times. Interestingly, his family had 19 cats at one time during Twain's childhood.

3. Mark Twain dropped out of school

The death of his father meant that his education was cut short. He took up a job as a printer's apprentice at the Hannibal Journal.

This did not cut his dream of getting an education. He spent most of his free time at the library in the evening self-educating.

In 1851, Twain moved to a typesetting job at a local newspaper owned by his older brother Orion. While working here, he wrote a couple of satirical items for the publication.

Twain lived in several other cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Keokuk, working as a printer.

Other than being a printer, he wanted to be a steamboat pilot. He was trained by Horace Bixby on the Mississippi River.

4. Mark Twain loved to self-educate

Since Mark Twain got very little formal education, he took up self-educating. He spent his free time at the public library burrowing through books.

This allowed him to see things from a different perspective. He valued education and saw it as a vital part of the growth of a human being.

Twain was critical of the education system in the United State during his time. He believed learning and education were two different things.

5. He got the name Mark Twain from a steamboat

You might be wondering how the name Mark Twain came about. Well, before going by his pen name, Samuel Clemens worked as a steamboat pilot.

As a pilot, the term twain is used instead of two. When a leadsman would call "by the mark twain" they would mean the river depth was safe for the steamboat.

Twain had always dreamt of becoming a steamboat pilot since he was a young boy. It was one of the most prestigious jobs at that time. He got his licence after two years of training.

As his writing career was taking off, he opted to use an alias. After trying out several names such as Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass and Sergeant Fathom, he settled on Mark Twain.

6. Mark Twain worked as a miner too

Twain was not afraid to try out different jobs, as long as it got him the money he needed. He took up a job in Virginia City, Nevada as a miner.

Together with his brother, they did not want to fight in the Civil War. They had briefly enlisted in a confederate local unit for a few weeks.

Unfortunately, this job turned out to be hard and dismal. The war greatly affected the mining trade.

Luckily, he did not have to work here for long. Twain got a writing job at Virginia City's newspaper. He wrote about crime, politics, mining and culture.

7. He first used his pen name while working as a journalist

While working at the Territorial Enterprise, a Virginia City newspaper, he used Mark Twain as his pen name for the first time.

His first literary work that was greatly celebrated as "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." This article appeared in the New York Saturday Press in 1865.

The article, which was a success, paved the way to a new opportunity at the Sacramento Union. He was sent on assignment to Hawaii to write a series of travelogues.

8. Mark Twain loved to travel

His new job at the Sacramento Union afforded him opportunities to travel the world. He travelled to the Mediterranean, Europe and the Middle East.

During one of his trips, he met his wife through her brother. He showed Twain a photo of Olivia and Twain said it was love at first sight. The two got married a few years later.

While in Switzerland, he visited the Lion monument and was quoted saying that "it is the most mournful and most moving piece of stone in the world".

Twain has lived in Dublin, New Hampshire, and San Francisco.

9. It took him seven years to complete the Adventures of Huckleberry

Twain started writing the sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, but he wasn't pleased with his progress. He picked it up again and finished writing in 1883.

His famous book, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was considered to be controversial. It was banned for its alleged crude language and lack of moral tone.

Book critics also condemned the book terming it as being racist and it was removed from some school reading list.

10. Mark Twain's bad luck: bad investments and bankruptcy

After becoming a successful writer, Twain put his money into several bad investments. None of his investments was profitable and was soon bankrupt.

He invested in one of his inventions, a self-pasting scrapbook which sold well. His investment in an automatic typesetting machine was a flop. It cost him more than $200,000.

He recovered financially after a successful lecture tour around the world. He paid all his creditors in full.

Discover Walks contributors speak from all corners of the world - from Prague to Bangkok, Barcelona to Nairobi. We may all come from different walks of life but we have one common passion - learning through travel.

Whether you want to learn the history of a city, or you simply need a recommendation for your next meal, Discover Walks Team offers an ever-growing travel encyclopaedia.

For local insights and insider's travel tips that you won't find anywhere else, search any keywords in the top right-hand toolbar on this page. Happy travels!

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Top 10 Facts about Mark Twain His given name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, but he chose Mark Twain as his pen name. Twain went to be one of the greatest American authors and humorists of the late 19th and early 20th century. Many people are familiar with his work and loved his stories but few [...]

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Alice Walker is an American novelist who is still alive today . She mostly writes short story and poems.
Her most famous book is the color purple which is about triumph over abuse. She is a famous feminist and is a trail blazer for women rights activism.
She also has many awards(Puzliler prize for fiction, national book award for fiction, NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature which was awarded to her in 2019 so very recently.

https://alicewalkersgarden.com

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week 24

Modernism is the time period in which global culture and arts started to change place . Modernism came right after realism which was the time period before it.
Many historical events took place in this time ( 1900s to 1950s). World War One, World War Two and the great depression. These were all restating events with millions of lives being greatly affected by them. This also effected artists and authors. many books were written on how they were treated during these tough times or what they went through. Fir example The diary of Anne frank, and the books of Corey ten boom.

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1920s

The 1920s were some of the best times in the history of America. During this time America as going through a great economic boom and citizens were enjoying the lavish luxuries of this boom. Many jobs were created because of the rise of the technology industry. Art and literature was still heavily effected by the first wold war. Even though there was a boom going on people were still ejected for the worse.

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The thirty and fortys were a tough time for Americas. They had just finished world war one had were now entering the great depression. As well as world war two. The American dream during the 1930s was the most famouse of the American dreams. Children a partener and a nice house with a white picket fense. I think the reason this dream was so liked was because it brought a sense of stability and happiness to such a depressing and rough time.

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The 1950s were a good and positive time for Americans. They won World War Two and had just come out of the heat depression. The American dream of the 50s was very similar t the one of the 30s and 40s. The only thing that has changes is job security. This was effected by the war. Many men and women came back and found that their job has been filled or that it was just not needed and could be done with out the need of a certain specialist. Music during this time also dramatically changed, instead of listening to country and classical younger generations were drawn to the new and exiting rock and roll. Also Disney land was opened.

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1920 to 1930s

The jazz age was a period of time mostly in the United States in which jazz rapidly grew.
The USA was the birth place of jazz.
Jazz is originally African American and helped them gain more of a social foothold in the civil rights area of the country. The reason it was called the jazz age is because jazz was incredibly popular and mostly played in African American community's . Many famous speakers during that time were jazz listeners. This is why it is called the Jazz age.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_Age

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The Jazz Age was a period in the 1920s and 1930s in which jazz music and dance styles gained worldwide popularity. The Jazz Age's cultural repercussions were primarily felt in the United States, the birthplace of jazz. Originating in New Orleans as mainly sourced from the culture of African Americans, jazz played a significant part in wider cultural changes in this period, and its influence on popular culture continued long afterwards.

The Jazz Age is often referred to in conjunction with the Roaring Twenties, and overlapped in significant cross-cultural ways with the Prohibition Era. The movement was largely affected by the introduction of radios nationwide. During this time, the Jazz Age was intertwined with the developing youth culture. The movement also helped introduce the European jazz movement.

The term jazz age was in popular usage prior to 1920. In 1922, American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald further popularized the term with the publication of his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age.

Jazz is a music genre that originated in the Black-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and developed from roots in blues and ragtime. New Orleans provided a cultural humus in which jazz could germinate because it was a port city with many cultures and beliefs intertwined. In New Orleans, the development of jazz was influenced by Creole music, ragtime, and blues.

Jazz is seen by many as "America's classical music". The earliest Jazz styles, which emerged in New Orleans, Chicago, and New York in the early 1920s, are sometimes referred to as " dixieland jazz." In the 1920s, jazz became recognized as a major form of musical expression. It then emerged in the form of independent traditional and popular musical styles, all linked by the common bonds of Black-American and European-American musical parentage with a performance orientation. From African traditions, jazz derived its rhythm, "blues", and traditions of playing or singing in one's own expressive way. From European traditions, jazz derived its harmony and instruments.

Louis Armstrong brought the improvisational solo to the forefront of a piece. Jazz is generally characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation.

Prohibition in the United States was a nationwide constitutional ban on the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages from 1920 to 1933. In the 1920s, the laws were widely disregarded, and tax revenues were lost. Well-organized criminal gangs took control of the beer and liquor supply for many cities, unleashing a crime wave that shocked the U.S. This prohibition was taken advantage of by gangsters such as Al Capone, and approximately $60 million (equivalent to $1,271,666,667 in 2023) in illegal alcohol was smuggled across the borders of Canada and the United States. The resulting illicit speakeasies that grew from this era became lively venues of the "Jazz Age", hosting popular music that included current dance songs, novelty songs and show tunes.

By the late 1920s, a new opposition mobilized across the U.S. Anti-prohibitionists, or "wets", attacked prohibition as causing crime, lowering local revenues, and imposing rural Protestant religious values on urban America. Prohibition ended with the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment, which repealed the Eighteenth Amendment on December 5, 1933. Some states continued statewide prohibition, marking one of the latter stages of the Progressive Era.

Formed as a result of the eighteenth amendment, speakeasies were places (often owned by organized criminals) where customers could drink alcohol and relax or speakeasy. Jazz was played in these speakeasies as a countercultural type of music to fit in with the illicit environment and events going on. Jazz artists were therefore hired to play at speakeasies. Al Capone, the famous organized crime leader, gave jazz musicians previously living in poverty a steady and professional income. Thaddeus Russell, in A Renegade History of the United States, states: "The singer Ethel Waters fondly recalled that Capone treated her 'with respect, applause, deference, and paid in full.'" Also from A Renegade History of the United States, "The pianist Earl Hines remembered that 'Scarface [Al Capone] got along well with musicians. He liked to come into a club with his henchmen and have the band play his requests. He was very free with $100 tips." The illegal culture of speakeasies led to what was known as "black and tan" clubs which had multiracial crowds.

There were many speakeasies, especially in Chicago and New York City. New York City had, at the height of Prohibition, 32,000 speakeasies. At speakeasies, both payoffs and mechanisms for hiding alcohol were used. Charlie Burns, in recalling his ownership of several speakeasies employed these strategies as a way to preserve his and Jack Kriendler's illegal clubs. This includes forming relationships with local police. Mechanisms that a trusted engineer created include one that when a button was pushed, tongue blocks under shelves of liquor would drop, making the shelves drop back and liquor bottles fall down a chute, break, and drain the alcohol through rocks and sand. An alarm also went off if the button was pushed to alert customers of a raid. Another mechanism used by Burns was a wine cellar with a thick door flush with the wall. It had a small, almost unnoticeable hole for a rod to be pushed in to activate a lock and open the door.

Rum running/bootlegging

As to where speakeasies obtained alcohol, there were rum runners and bootleggers. Rum running, in this case, was the organized smuggling of liquor by land or sea into the U.S. Decent foreign liquor was high-end alcohol during prohibition, and William McCoy had some of the best of it. Bill McCoy was in the rum-running business, and at certain points of time was ranked among the best. To avoid being caught, he sold liquor just outside the territorial waters of the United States. Buyers would come to him to pick up his booze as a precaution for McCoy. McCoy's liquor specialty was selling high-quality whiskey without diluting the alcohol. Bootlegging was making and or smuggling alcohol around the U.S. As selling the alcohol could make plenty of money, there are several major ways this was done. One strategy used by Frankie Yale and the Genna brothers gang (both involved in organized crime) was to give poor Italian Americans alcohol stills to make alcohol for them at $15 per day's work. Another strategy was to buy liquor from rumrunners. Racketeers would also buy closed breweries and distilleries and hire former employees to make alcohol. Another person famous for organized crime named Johnny Torrio partnered with two other mobsters and legitimate brewer Joseph Stenson to make illegal beer in a total of nine breweries. Finally, some racketeers stole industrial grain alcohol and redistilled it to sell in speakeasies.

From 1919, Kid Ory's Original Creole Jazz Band of musicians from New Orleans played in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where in 1922 they became the first black jazz band of New Orleans origin to make recordings. The year also saw the first recording by Bessie Smith, the most famous of the 1920s blues singers. Chicago, meanwhile, was the main center developing the new " Hot Jazz", where King Oliver joined Bill Johnson. Bix Beiderbecke formed The Wolverines in 1924.

Top: excerpt from the straight melody of "Mandy, Make Up Your Mind" by George W. Meyer & Arthur Johnston. Bottom: corresponding solo excerpt by Louis Armstrong (1924).

The same year, Louis Armstrong joined the Fletcher Henderson dance band as featured soloist, leaving in 1925. The original New Orleans style was polyphonic, with theme variation and simultaneous collective improvisation. Armstrong was a master of his hometown style, but by the time he joined Henderson's band, he was already a trailblazer in a new phase of jazz, with its emphasis on arrangements and soloists. Armstrong's solos went well beyond the theme-improvisation concept, and extemporized on chords, rather than melodies. According to Schuller, by comparison, the solos by Armstrong's bandmates (including a young Coleman Hawkins), sounded "stiff, stodgy," with "jerky rhythms and a grey undistinguished tone quality." The following example shows a short excerpt of the straight melody of "Mandy, Make Up Your Mind" by George W. Meyer and Arthur Johnston (top), compared with Armstrong's solo improvisations (below) (recorded 1924). (The example approximates Armstrong's solo, as it does not convey his use of swing.)

Armstrong's solos were a significant factor in making jazz a true 20th-century language. After leaving Henderson's group, Armstrong formed his virtuosic Hot Five band, which included instrumentalist's Kid Ory (trombone), Johnny Dodds (clarinet), Johnny St. Cyr (banjo), and wife Lil on piano, where he popularized scat singing.

Jelly Roll Morton recorded with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings in an early mixed-race collaboration, then in 1926 formed his Red Hot Peppers. There was a larger market for jazzy dance music played by white orchestras, such as Jean Goldkette's orchestra and Paul Whiteman's orchestra. In 1924, Whiteman commissioned Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, premiered by Whiteman's Orchestra. Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald opined that Rhapsody in Blue idealized the youthful zeitgeist of the Jazz Age. By the mid-1920s, Whiteman was the most popular bandleader in the U.S. His success was based on a "rhetoric of domestication" according to which he had elevated and rendered valuable a previously inchoate kind of music. Other influential large ensembles included Fletcher Henderson's band, Duke Ellington's band (which opened an influential residency at the Cotton Club in 1927) in New York, and Earl Hines' Band in Chicago (who opened in The Grand Terrace Cafe there in 1928). All significantly influenced the development of big band-style swing jazz. By 1930, the New Orleans-style ensemble was a relic, and jazz belonged to the world.

Several musicians grew up in musical families, where a family member would often teach how to read and play music. Included in this group was the bandleader Guy Lombardo, who collaborated with his brothers Carmen and Lebert in Canada to form the Royal Canadians Orchestra in the early 1920s. By 1929 their "sweet" big band appeared regularly at the landmark Roosevelt Hotel in New York City and later in 1959 at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where they entertained audiences nationwide for decades with a velvety-smooth interpretation of the "sweetest music this side of heaven". Despite Benny Goodman's claim that "sweet" music was a "weak sister" as compared to the "real music" of America, Lombardo's band enjoyed widespread popularity which crossed racial divides and was even praised by Louis Armstrong as one of his favorites.

Some musicians, like Pops Foster, learned on homemade instruments.

Urban radio stations played African-American jazz more frequently than suburban stations, due to the concentration of African Americans in urban areas such as New York and Chicago. Younger demographics popularized the black-originated dances such as the Charleston as part of the immense cultural shift the popularity of jazz music generated.

The 1930s belonged to popular swing big bands, in which some virtuoso soloists became as famous as the band leaders. Key figures in developing the "big" jazz band included bandleaders and arrangers Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Harry James, Jimmie Lunceford, Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw. Although it was a collective sound, swing also offered individual musicians a chance to "solo" and improvise melodic, thematic solos which could at times be complex "important" music.

Over time, social strictures regarding racial segregation began to relax in America: white bandleaders began to recruit black musicians and black bandleaders recruit white ones. In the mid-1930s, Benny Goodman hired pianist Teddy Wilson, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton and guitarist Charlie Christian to join small groups. In the 1930s, Kansas City Jazz as exemplified by tenor saxophonist Lester Young marked the transition from big bands to the bebop influence of the 1940s. An early 1940s style known as "jumping the blues" or jump blues used small combos, uptempo music and blues chord progressions, drawing on boogie-woogie from the 1930s.

The introduction of large-scale radio broadcasts enabled the rapid national spread of jazz in 1932. The radio was described as the "sound factory." Radio made it possible for millions to hear music for free - especially people who never attended expensive, distant big city clubs. These broadcasts originated from clubs in leading centers such as New York, Chicago, Kansas City, and Los Angeles. There were two categories of live music on the radio: concert music and big band dance music. The concert music was known as "potter palm" and was concert music by amateurs, usually volunteers. Big band dance music is played by professionals and was featured in remote broadcasts from nightclubs, dance halls, and ballrooms.

Musicologist Charles Hamm described three types of jazz music at the time: black music for black audiences, black music for white audiences, and white music for white audiences. Jazz artists like Louis Armstrong originally received very little airtime because most stations preferred to play the music of white American jazz singers. Other jazz vocalists include Bessie Smith and Florence Mills. In urban areas, such as Chicago and New York, African-American jazz was played on the radio more often than in the suburbs. Big-band jazz, like that of James Reese Europe and Fletcher Henderson in New York, attracted large radio audiences.

Young people in the 1920s used the influence of jazz to rebel against the traditional culture of previous generations. This youth rebellion of the 1920s included such things as flapper fashions, women who smoked cigarettes in public, a willingness to talk about sex freely, and radio concerts. Dances like the Charleston, developed by African Americans, suddenly became popular among the youth. Traditionalists were aghast at what they considered the breakdown of morality. Some urban middle-class African Americans perceived jazz as "devil's music", and believed the improvised rhythms and sounds were promoting promiscuity.

With women's suffrage-the right for women to vote-at its peak with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment on August 18, 1920, and the entrance of the free-spirited flapper, women began to take on a larger role in society and culture. With women now taking part in the work force after the end of the First World War there were now many more possibilities for women in terms of social life and entertainment. Ideas such as equality and open sexuality were very popular during the time and women seemed to capitalize on these ideas during this period. The 1920s saw the emergence of many famous women musicians, including Bessie Smith. Bessie Smith also gained attention because she was not only a great singer but also an African-American woman. She has grown through the ages to be one of the most well respected singers of all time and inspired later performers such as Billie Holiday.

Lovie Austin (1887-1972) was a Chicago-based bandleader, session musician (piano), composer, singer, and arranger during the 1920s classic blues era. She and Lil Hardin Armstrong often are ranked as two of the best female jazz blues piano players of the period.

Piano player Lil Hardin Armstrong was originally a member of King Oliver's band with Louis, and went on to play piano in her husband's band the Hot Five and then his next group called the Hot Seven. It was not until the 1930s and 1940s that many women jazz singers, such as Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, were recognized as successful artists in the music world. Another famous female vocalist who attained stardom at the tail-end of the Jazz Age was Ella Fitzgerald, one of the more popular female jazz singers in the United States for more than half a century and later dubbed "The First Lady of Song". She worked with all the jazz greats of the era, including Chick Webb, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Benny Goodman. These women were persistent in striving to make their names known in the music industry and to lead the way for many more women artists to come.

The birth of jazz is credited to African Americans. But it was modified to become socially acceptable to middle-class white Americans. Those critical of jazz saw it as music from people with no training or skill. White performers were used as a vehicle for the popularization of jazz music in America. Although jazz was taken over by the white middle-class population, it facilitated the mesh of African American traditions and ideals with white middle-class society.

By the 1920s jazz had spread around the world. According to The New York Times in 1922:

Jazz latitude is marked as indelibly on the globe as the heavy line of the equator. It runs from Broadway along Main Street to San Francisco: to the Hawaiian Islands, which it has lyricized to fame; to Japan, where it is hurriedly adopted as some new Western culture; to the Philippines, where it is royally welcomed back as its own; to China where the mandarins and even the coolies look upon it as a helpful sign that the Occident at last knows what is music; to Siam, where the barbaric tunes strike a kindred note and come home to roost; to India, where the natives receive it dubiously, while the colonists seize upon it avidly; to the East Indies, where it holds sway in its elementary form - ragtime; to Egypt, where it sounds so curiously familiar and where it has set Cairo dance mad; to Palestine, where it is looked upon as an inevitable and necessary evil along with liberation; across the Mediterranean, where all ships and all shores have been inoculated with the germ; to Monte Carlo and the Riviera, where the jazz idea has been adopted as its own enfant-chéri; to Paris, which has its special versions of jazz; to London, which long has sworn to shake off the fever, but still is jazzing; and back again to Tinpan Alley, where each day, nay, each hour, adds some new inspiration that will slowly but surely meander along jazz latitude.

As only a limited number of American jazz records were released in Europe, European jazz traces many of its roots to American artists such as James Reese Europe, Paul Whiteman, Mike Danzi and Lonnie Johnson, who visited Europe during and after World War I. It was their live performances which inspired European audiences' interest in jazz, as well as the interest in all things American (and therefore exotic) which accompanied the economic and political woes of Europe during this time. The beginnings of a distinct European style of jazz began to emerge in this interwar period.

British jazz began with a tour by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1919. In 1926, Fred Elizalde and His Cambridge Undergraduates began broadcasting on the BBC. Thereafter jazz became an important element in many leading dance orchestras, and jazz instrumentalists became numerous. Very soon, the resulting music craze in the United Kingdom led to a moral panic in which the threat of jazz to society was exemplified by Scottish artist John Bulloch Souter's controversial 1926 painting The Breakdown. The painting has been described as embodying the fears of Western civilization towards jazz music, and the painting was later destroyed by its author to placate critics who insisted the work should be burned.

The European style of jazz entered full swing in France with the Quintette du Hot Club de France, which began in 1934. Much of this French jazz was a combination of African-American jazz and the symphonic styles in which French musicians were well-trained; in this, it is easy to see the inspiration taken from Paul Whiteman since his style was also a fusion of the two. Belgian guitarist Django Reinhardt popularized gypsy jazz, a mix of 1930s American swing, French dance hall " musette", and Eastern European folk with a languid, seductive feel; the main instruments were steel-stringed guitar, violin, and double bass. Solos pass from one player to another as guitar and bass form the rhythm section. Some researchers believe Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti pioneered the guitar-violin partnership characteristic of the genre which was brought to France after they had been heard live or on Okeh Records in the late 1920s.

During this period, jazz began to get a reputation as being immoral, and many members of the older generations saw it as threatening the old cultural values and promoting the new decadent values of the Roaring Twenties. Professor Henry van Dyke of Princeton University wrote: "[I]t is not music at all. It's merely an irritation of the nerves of hearing, a sensual teasing of the strings of physical passion." The media also spoke ill of it. The New York Times in the 1920s intimated that jazz was responsible for the decline of Western civilization and of the quality of Italian tenors, a poor trade balance with Hungary, a classical musician's fatal heart attack, and frightening bears in Siberia.

As jazz flourished, American elites who preferred classical music sought to expand the listenership of their favored genre, hoping that jazz would not become mainstream. Conversely, jazz became an influence on composers as diverse as George Gershwin and Herbert Howells.

1. ^ Horn, David; Shephard, John, eds. (2012). Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World: Genres North America. Vol. 8. Bloomsbury. p. 472. ISBN 978-1-4411-4874-2. Armstrong and Lombardo did not view their worlds as diametrically opposed, nor did many other contemporary musicians of the 1930s. ...Lombardo himself always took great pride in the number of black orchestras that imitated his style.

2. ^ Hershey, Burnet (June 25, 1922). "Jazz Latitude". The New York Times. pp. T5. Archived from the original on June 26, 2022.

3. ^ Kater, Michael (April 1, 1988). "The Jazz Experience in Weimar Germany". German History. 6 (2). Oxford University Press: 145-158. doi:10.1093/gh/6.2.145. American Jazz was imported into Germany in the early 1920s...some two to five years after it had entered Britain or France...genuine American Jazz musicians (such as)... Mike Danzi embarked on a German tour with American bandleader Alex Hyde before deciding to make Berlin his permanent European base....As the great majority of German musicians still found jazz very difficult to master, it was Americans and a few Englishmen who came to dominate the jazz scene of the Roaring Twenties...

"A German Interpreter of Jazz". The Literary Digest. Vol. 62. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. August 23, 1919 - via Google Books. Some might, indeed, suppose that this muse had her jazz age behind her.

Barlow, William (January 1, 1995). "Black Music on Radio During the Jazz Age". African American Review. 29 (2). St. Louis, Missouri: Modern Language Association: 325-328. doi:10.2307/3042311. JSTOR 3042311.

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Borzillo, Carrie (June 29, 1996). "Women in Jazz: Music on Their Terms". . Vol. 108, no. 26.

Chevan, David (2002). "Musical Literacy and Jazz Musicians in the 1910s and 1920s" (PDF). Current Musicology. No. 71-73. New York: Columbia University Libraries. doi:10.7916/cm.v0i71-73.4825. Archived (PDF) from the original on February 25, 2021.

Dunkel, Mario (2015). "W.C. Handy, Abbe Niles, and (Auto)biographical Positioning in the Whiteman Era". Popular Music and Society. 38 (2). United Kingdom: Taylor and Francis: 122-139. doi:10.1080/03007766.2014.994320. S2CID 191480580.

Fass, Paula S. (1977). The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-502148-6. LCCN 76-42644 - via Internet Archive.

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Germuska, Joe (October 17, 1995). "The Map". Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University. Archived from the original on December 10, 1997. Derived from Berendt, Joachim-Ernst (1992). The Jazz Book: From Ragtime to Fusion and Beyond. Chicago, Illinois: Lawrence Hill Books. ISBN 9781556520990. Archived from the original on July 18, 2022 - via Google Books.

Henderson, Amy (May 10, 2013). "What the Great Gatsby Got Right About the Jazz Age". Smithsonian Magazine. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. Archived from the original on February 6, 2020.

Hennessey, Thomas (1973). From Jazz to Swing: Black Jazz Musicians and Their Music, 1917-1935 (Ph.D. dissertation). Ann Arbor, Michigan: Northwestern University - via Internet Archive.

Jackson, Jeffrey (2002). "Making Jazz French: The Reception of Jazz Music in Paris, 1927-1934". French Historical Studies. 25 (1). Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press: 149-170. doi:10.1215/00161071-25-1-149. S2CID 161520728.

"jazz age, n.". Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. September 2021. Archived from the original on November 20, 2021.

"Jazz Origins in New Orleans". New Orleans, Louisiana: National Park Service. 2015. Archived from the original on June 5, 2020.

Okrent, Daniel (April 30, 2010). Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. New York: Scribner. ISBN 978-0-7432-7702-0. LCCN 2009051127 - via Google Books.

McCann, Paul (2008). "Performing Primitivism: Disarming the Social Threat of Jazz in Narrative Fiction of the Early Sixties". The Journal of Popular Culture. 41 (4). Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell. doi:10.1111/J.1540-5931.2008.00541.X.

Rodgers, Andrew (August 27, 1997). "The Genna Brothers". Chicago Tribune. Chicago, Illinois. Archived from the original on December 13, 2019.

Savran, David (2006). "The Search for America's Soul: Theatre in the Jazz Age". Theatre Journal. 58 (3). Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press: 459-476. doi:10.1353/tj.2006.0171. JSTOR 25069871. S2CID 192117168.

Schuller, Gunther (1968). Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development. New York: Oxford University Press. LCCN 68-17610 - via Internet Archive.

Shearer, Carly (April 24, 2018). "The Threat of Jazz: John Bulloch Souter's 'The Breakdown'". Edinburgh, Scotland: Lyon & Turnbull. Archived from the original on November 22, 2021.

The Houghton Line. Vol. 24-25. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: E. F. Houghton & Co. 1919 - via Google Books. I am not convinced, however, that the 'jazz age' is the cause of the church losing its influence.

Ward, Geoffrey C.; Burns, Ken (2001). Jazz: A History of America's Music (1st ed.). New York: Pimlico. ISBN 978-0-679-76539-4 - via Internet Archive.

Wilson, Nancy (December 19, 2007). "Fletcher Henderson: 'Architect of Swing'". NPR's Jazz Profiles. Washington, D.C.: National Public Radio (NPR). Archived from the original on April 21, 2018.

Wynn, Neil A., ed. (2007). Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe (1st ed.). Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-60473-546-8. Archived from the original on July 18, 2022 - via Google Books.

Allen, Frederick Lewis (1931). Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties (1st ed.). New York and London: Harper & Brothers - via Internet Archive.

Allen, Frederick Lewis (1939). Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America. New York: Harper and Row - via Internet Archive.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1945). "Echoes of the Jazz Age". In Wilson, Edmund (ed.). . New York: New Directions. pp. 13-22. ISBN 0-8112-0051-5 - via Internet Archive. See The Crack-Up.

Kyvig, David E. (2002). Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1939: Decades of Promise and Pain. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-29555-7. LCCN 2001023857 - via Internet Archive.

Leuchtenburg, William (1958). The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-1932. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-47368-6. LCCN 58-5680 - via Internet Archive.

Lynd, Robert S.; Lynd, Helen Merrell (1929). Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company - via Internet Archive.

Mowry, George E. (1963). The Twenties: Fords, Flappers, & Fanatics. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. LCCN 63-19425 - via Internet Archive.

Sullivan, Mark (1936). Our Times, 1900-1925: Volume IV - The Twenties (1st ed.). New York and London: Charles Scribner's Sons - via Internet Archive.

1. ^ Teal, Kimberly Hannon (June 15, 2021), "Jazz Places: How Performance Spaces Shape Jazz History", Jazz Places, University of California Press, doi:10.1525/9780520972841/html#contents, ISBN 978-0-520-97284-1

2. ^ Guerpin, Martin (2023). "From the History of Jazz in Europe towards a European History of Jazz: The International Federation of Hot Clubs (1935-6) and 'Jazz Internationalism'". Journal of the Royal Musical Association. 147 (2): 582-594. doi:10.1017/rma.2022.27. ISSN 0269-0403.

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The Jazz Age was a period in the 1920s and 1930s in which jazz music and dance styles gained worldwide popularity. The Jazz Age's cultural repercussions were primarily felt in the United States, the birthplace of jazz.

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1920s

The roaring twenties was a crazy time for America as well as being a fun one. During this time jazz had just been born and was touching the hearts of many. Bootlegging was also introduced and is a topic I know much about. Many illegal brewers would but large v8 engines in to their light weight was so that they would be able to outrun the police. This is also the birth of Nascar.

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The 50s was a slow time but one of hope many people and countries were still effected by world war two which ended only five years prior. Many civil rights movments happend at this time as well as the dawn of the cold war.

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The sixties and seventies was a seriously stress full time for all people. The cuban missile crisis happened as well as the Vietnam war which killed thousands and was pointless. John F Kennedy and Martin Luther king junior were assassinated. Nasa and the united stated government put the first man on the moon, and one the space race.
There was also many social movements and civil rights breakthroughs.

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The American dream of the 80s was fairly different from the previous decades. Peoples main goal was to make tons of money and pass financial stability. People now had a better understanding of what was going on around them for they now had cable television. It was around in the 70s but was now present in all homes. Pop was now growing as well as the king of pop michal jackson who was one of the most famouse people of the decade.

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The 90s and 2000s dream was very similar to the 80s dream but instead of just money people wanted power and status as well. The 90s went from pop to rock in roll to heavy metal music like nirvana.

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fates and furies
Is based on the perspective of man and women from different perspectives. In the book we see the perspectives of a happy marriage from a husband and wife and what makes them happy.