The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War - Hardcover

Reassesses the role of the California Gold Rush in the events and crises leading up to the Civil War, analyzing not only the hunger for gold, but also the squabbling over bringing California in as a slave state, the proposed division of the state into two regions, the political maneuverings and battles, and the economic factors involved. 15,000 first printing.

Leonard L. Richards, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, took his degrees at the University of California, Berkeley and Davis. He has also taught at San Francisco State College and the University of Hawaii. His Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America won the 1970 American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award. The Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, and The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780—1860 took the second-place 2001 Lincoln Prize. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.