Folio Society – THE AGE OF GOLD: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream by H. W. Brands

On 24 January 1848, the carpenter James Marshall noticed some sparkling flecks in a dry riverbed at Coloma, California. Having discovered, to his excited disbelief, that the shining nuggets were malleable, but not breakable, he approached his colleagues and uttered four words which would go down in history: ‘I have found it’.

Marshall’s discovery of gold at Coloma on the American River, writes the distinguished historian H. W. Brands, was ‘one of those rare moments that divide human existence into before and after’. It triggered ‘the most astonishing mass movement of peoples since the Crusades’, as fortune-seekers from all over the world flocked to California; their journey ‘was the epic of the age, a saga of world history, an adventure on the largest scale’. The new state’s population boomed from 15,000 in 1848 to 250,000 four years later, while the Gold Rush inspired a new American dream: the ‘dream of instant wealth, won by audacity and good luck’.

The Age of Gold, writes the eminent historian Kevin Starr in his introduction, is ‘a sophisticated and rollicking book asking us to take another look at this pivotal event in the creation of American society, character, and personality.’ This edition features numerous contemporary photographs, many of them rarely seen.

Brands, writes Starr, ‘is a master of … collective or communal narrative’. His fast-paced epic tells the stories of over 100 characters, from Louise Amelia Knapp, a doctor’s wife who reported from the mining camps, to Leland Stanford, a hardware retailer who organised the western half of the transcontinental railroad; from adventurers John and Jessie Frémont to a certain Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain). Scholarly and insightful, with a novelist’s eye for detail, Brands documents San Francisco’s growth from missionary settlement to booming metropolis, and analyses the social upheaval occasioned by the Rush, which accelerated both the American Industrial Revolution and the Civil War. Furthermore, the Rush offers a highly pertinent evaluation of how natural resources can be exploited by mankind.

DESCRIPTION: Introduced by Kevin Starr. Bound in cloth blocked with a design by Raquel Leis Allion. Set in Miller. 584 pages. Frontispiece and 24 pages of colour and black & white plates. Printed map endpapers. Plain slipcase. 9½˝ x 6¼˝

CONDITION: Book is NEW and SEALED in the publisher’s original SHRINK WRAP (see photos). Photos 1 to 6 are of the actual book that is listed. Whilst photos 7 to 10 are stock photos.

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