The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World by Nathaniel Philbrick

January 1848. A carpenter spots flecks of gold in a shallow stream at Sutter’s Mill, and nothing in America is quite the same again.

From a National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist, the author of In the Heart of the Sea and Mayflower, comes a sweeping new history of how the Gold Rush set off the greatest voluntary migration in U.S. history and pushed a fragile republic closer to civil war.

This is no tidy tale of sudden riches. It’s the origin story of modern America’s contradictions: fortunes made at dizzying speed, democracy tangled up with private power, and a stubborn belief in the American experiment that refuses to fade.

You’ll travel from the feverish mining camps of the Sierra Nevada to the wharves and vigilance committees of San Francisco. Along the way you’ll meet:

• Chilean brothers reinventing themselves to outrun prejudice
• Native communities facing dispossession and violence
• Samuel Brannan, the merchant-showman drawn into early vigilantism
• Rival politicians David Broderick and William Gwin, locked in a fight over slavery and California’s future

It’s a clear, human story, and a gripping one. Follow the gold from riverbed to countinghouse to the halls of Washington, and see how the debate over slavery in the West tipped the balance of a nation.

A perfect fit for American history lovers, fans of narrative nonfiction, and anyone who likes to understand how the past still echoes today.

Here at the shop, this new hardcover is the kind of book we love to hand across the counter. Settle in, linger over the pages, and let a salty sea breeze from the cove carry you all the way to the California foothills.

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