Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Contested Eden

University of California Press

History, as the study of change over time, always requires that we stop periodically to take stock. Whether we measure by years, decades, or centuries, by regions, cohorts, or generations, the goal is identical: to assess what has transpired and what still remains to be done. California became part of the United States of America a century and a half ago. On the event of the state's sesquicentennial we commemorate our genealogies and complex pasts, acknowledging the debts of knowledge and interpretation we owe to previous generations, fashioning our present with distinct questions and concerns, charting a course toward a richer, more complex understanding of the past.

In the years since 1850, when statehood was won, California has gone from a space sparsely populated to the most populous place in the Union. Once a largely isolated backwater where Native Americans subsisted on hunt products, on plantings, and what could be gathered, California has been continuously and radically transformed, and periodically renewed. Spanish-speaking settlers arrived febrile with dreams of gold. But on finding none, they settled for lordship over the land and over its native labor. Gold was eventually discovered by Anglo-Americans in 1848. Gold fever truly gripped the national imagination then, and in California that fever has never completely cooled.

In the Golden State, one generation after another has found a tangible place on which to project its myths and fantasies of utopic possibility. Eden, Arcadia, lands flowing with milk and honey, gardens grander than Nebuchadnezzar's in California such dreams have taken form. Parched deserts have been turned into verdant fields of plenty. The sea constantly yields its bounty. The aerospace industry has given us mastery over our universe. And our edifices scrape the sky and color the horizons.

A map of California drawn in 1830 by Josi Marma Narvaez, showing the missions,
presidios, pueblos, and ranchos strung along the coast, and the massive wetlands
the ciengas  or tulares that filled the Central Valley. Though not many years would pass
before topographers came to understand more fully the great complexity of the California
landscape, it is relatively recently that historians have begun to explore some long-neglected
aspects of the Golden State's storied past, working to create a history that
is more comprehensive, more inclusive, and more subtle than older accounts.  Courtesy 
Bancroft Library .

California's is today the sixth largest economy in the world because of its incredible human and natural resources. Since the earliest days of human occupation, California has been home to numerous linguistic, ethnic, racial, and national groups. If in ancient times the first natives of this land were Asians from Siberia, Asian presence today is much more diverse and of even grander import. If from central Mexico came the Spanish impetus for settling California, over the centuries Mexican presence has only grown. The Anglo-Americans who first visited California under Mexican rule were a diverse lot. The boom towns they and the forty-niners fueled were often cosmopolitan sites for feasting and hosting diplomats and plenipotentates, raiders and traders, and just plain folk. California, a state blessed by numerous microclimates, has also been cursed by virulent climates of hate, genocide, and intolerance for differences born of blood, faith, and race.

California is today the product of these multiple and diverse pasts. Still vibrant and alive today are many human memories of feast and famine, joy and pain, centrality and marginality, power and powerlessness. These memories are the potent stuff of history, for they fuel conflicting narratives of how it was in the "olden days." Call them golden days of yore or hurtful times that remain tender and sore, they are, nevertheless, wellsprings of historical imagination and the breeding ground of historians. Communities of memory and interest in the present cannot advance a trajectory toward the future without a commonly accepted origin and useable past. This is even more the case today, as California's population is renewed by immigrants from every corner of the globe.

Historians and the histories they write have always been the imaginative products of the period in which they were produced. Each generation turns to the past with different questions, with new concerns, with different hopes and anxieties. Since the 1960s there has been a revolution in historical writing about the United States, and about California's past more specifically. The exact causal lineages for this profound transformation are complicated and remain open to debate. Obviously, such change was born of generational tensions, fueled by the war in Vietnam, and intensified in the late 1950s and early 1960s by the massive social movements for civil rights, women's equality, lesbian and gay freedom, and the full extension of personhood to the very young, the very old, the disabled, and the transgendered. Eventually the force of state was given to the reaffirmation of our egalitarian constitutional principles, and as this occurred, educational institutions were desegregated and the American mind was opened to different ways of thinking and to perspectives on the past that were situated in relationship to power.

The impact of these changes on contemporary historical writing has been a heightened body ethic. Greater attention and importance is given to the human body, particularly to those physical aspects by which the status inequalities of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity are read. Now, for history-as-written to be deemed

a good depiction of history-as-lived, it must acknowledge that it is but a very small slice or limited perspective on a whole as viewed from a specific locale, rather than a transcendent total perspective. For a social whole to be represented, a matrix of society's status groups must be systematically addressed. No longer is it considered adequate to write the history of men without acknowledging the presence of women, and vice versa. Power and its relational dyads conqueror and conquered, master and slave, white and Indian, male and female, rich and poor, old and young are similarly the focus of new and sustained attention.

Much of what is considered new in historical writing stems from profound epistemological shifts, most notably an attack on positivism and empiricism as truths, and the feminist critique of modernism's transcendent, universal "Man." Modernity was that extraordinary intellectual effort on the part of Enlightenment thinkers to develop objective science and a universal morality and law. The idea was to use the accumulation of knowledge, generated by many individuals working freely and creatively, for the pursuit of human emancipation and the enrichment of daily life. The scientific domination of nature promised freedom from scarcity, want, and the arbitrariness of natural calamities. Rational forms...