Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping of California

David Wyatt offers a far-seeing account of California history, shaped by a complex of catastrophes--ethnic clashes, ecological conquests, fires, and earthquakes--that are replayed even today. He writes of politicians who founded their careers on ideas of purity and exclusion, of immigrants who arrived seeking to remake themselves in a strange new world just as they do today, often returning to themes of cultural collision. (Witness the Rodney King riots and the O. J. Simpson trial.) Wyatt draws on dozens of overlooked sources--most notably the memoir of the Native American 18th-century chronicler Pablo Tac and the diaries of Chinese, Japanese, African American, and Hispanic immigrants--to craft a remarkable, sobering story.