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[skygiants]

For some reason, I am completely fascinated by is California history. I don't know why! I went to college in California, which was fun, but I never felt a super-strong connection to the area and I don't really want to go back on a long-term basis or anything. Still, for some reason, if you set a story in early California I am pretty much guaranteed to sit up and pay attention. And then start dorking out all over the history and kind of forget about the need for the plot to make sense. Uh.

(I mean, part of it is obviously that California history is super fascinating, but it's not like everywhere else's history isn't fascinating also! HISTORY IS COOL, GUYS. /end dorkout.)

Fiction authors that I love for their bits of California history include:
Kage Baker! Kage Baker is a double whammy for me because she is super enthusiastic about California history AND about Tudor England, and in almost all of her books she is prone to taking long rambly digressions from the plot to tell you about THIS TOTALLY COOL THING THAT HAPPENED IN CALIFORNIA THAT TIME, dude, isn't it crazy! Mendoza in Hollywood is maybe the best for this, but California history is woven all throughout her books and it is a large part of the reason I adore her. (Warning that Sky Coyote starts out seriously faily, but gets much better!)

Isabel Allende - I sometimes find the main characters in her Daughter of Fortune and Portrait in Sepia kind of bland, but I don't even care because her portrait of 19th-century California is so fascinating!

Laurence Yep - almost all his books that are not set in fantasyland are set in San Francisco, and he knows his stuff. I really need to read his Golden Mountain chronicles, which follow a Chinese family through San Francisco history.

Ysabeau Wilce - her Flora Segunda books are totally fantasyland, so this doesn't quite fit into the 'history' category, but - it's fantasyland California! WHICH IS SO AWESOME, and something I don't think I've ever seen anyone else do, at least not believably.

Nonfictionwise, nextian recently recced me Frances Dinkelspiel's Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California as a good book on California history, and it is a seriously cool read. I mean, as far as early California Big Names go, Isaias Hellman was pretty short on scandalous gossip - he was an extremely respectable banker! He loved his wife and kids! It is ever so slightly possible that he may have been associated with some people who bribed the mayor one time! - but it nonetheless seriously fascinating, both in terms of Jewish history (Hellman was part of a large group of Jewish immigrants who were friends and relatives back home, and helped each other out as they started forming GINORMOUSLY SUCCESSFUL businesses in the States) and as a portrait of the development of Los Angeles and San Francisco from a couple of hastily-thrown-up gold-rush towns to the giant, overdeveloped cities that we know and love today. The change over the sixty years that Hellman lived and worked in California is kind of incredible - you get the era of stagecoach robberies and a murder-a-day in LA, the San Francisco earthquake, the founding of the electric companies, WWI, all together.

I am definitely on the lookout for more books of California history, and I am also on the lookout for more fiction books that are full of California history - so, flist, I have two requests for you today. Either rec me books, fiction or nonfiction, that are awesome for California-history dorkouts, or tell me about a period of history that fills you with your own history-kink dorky joy, and I will see if I can rec you anything likewise!

Comments

[cupenny.livejournal.com]

Hee. When my mom was working to get her teaching credential, she fell in love with California History, and went into teaching 4th grade because of it. (ie, the grade that goes over California History) I will have to ask her later about more books, but one that springs to mind is Bacon and Beans from a Gold Pan (http://www.amazon.com/Bacon-Beans-Prospecting-Treasure-Hunting/dp/0944194125/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251233158&sr=1-2). Non-fiction, about a husband and wife who survived prospecting gold during the Depression. Which, a lot of people did, and apparently more gold was taken out of the Sierras during the Depression than the original Gold Rush? *cannot recall*

Most other books we have around here are non-fiction- I know I have some on the missions and S. California settlements. No books on the local family that settled this area, but I've been to the Workman Homestead Museum down the road a few times and remember stuff from the tours. This is due to one of the world-building ideas I have (that I've yet to find a story for!) with fantasy set in a non-Midevel, non-European world, as most are- but in something much more like California with the Spanish Rancheros. Weee- reference books ftw!

[skygiants]

Oooh. *makes note* Thank you! Recs on all of that would be awesome. (I would love honest stuff on the missions especially, since a lot of the information that's out there is so sanitized.)

DUDE you should so do it! Like I said in the post, Ysabeau Wilce's books are the only ones I have ever seen to do a California-based fantasyland, and there's so much stuff to play with there! They would have to deal with earthquakes and droughts and the Santa Anas, and man, the redwoods are basically fantasyland botany all by themselves and they're real.

[mercuriazs.livejournal.com]

Becca: DID YOU KNOW.

Apparently nextian is coming to my school! She's friends with A! I have yet to figure out how to contact her. Also I'm sort of worried I might have the wrong one.

IT BLOWS MY MIND A LITTLE.

[skygiants]

I did not know! :O I will a.) be jealous (all the cool people are in California now that I am on longer there!) and b.) ask you each to say hi to each other for me . . . despite the fact that I can say hi to both of you on LJ. Uh. But it is not the same!

[nextian.livejournal.com]

Hahah, in fact I am, er, creepily at your school right now! Okay, in the Claremont Graduate Apartments above a guy who thinks "walking around" = "making too much noise at eleven o'clock", but whatever.

Have we talked about this yet? I would love to meet up! When do you get to campus?

[obopolsk.livejournal.com]

Ooh, any colonial America recs? I read a lot of the medieval stuff out there, but colonial America is my second favorite historical period, and I do not read nearly enough about it.

[skygiants]

Oooh, I haven't read nearly enough about that period - especially considering I grew up in Philadelphia, capital of Colonial America - but I think have some for you! Let's see:

Octavia Butler's Wild Seed has some pretty fascinating colonial America stuff mixed in with the telapathic plotline - the first half of the book takes place in the 1600s, and the main characters live for a while in a colonial village.

I read The Last Witchfinger a few years back - I remember having mixed feelings about parts of it, but the colonial America stuff is very well-done and well-researched, and it is partly narrated by a copy of Newton's Principia Mathematica, which is basically just an awesome mode of storytelling. And Benjamin Franklin features as a love interest! SPEAKING OF, apparently there is a series of mystery books where Benjamin Franklin FIGHTS CRIME. I cannot rec because I have not read, but my feeling on this is that I must hunt it down immediately!

Obviously if you have not seen the musical 1776, go out and rent it AT ONCE, because it is amazing.

[magwana.livejournal.com]

In 1776 they sing. About. Democracy.

I love it.

Also, please find this Ben Franklin as a crime-fighter book. I must have it.

[skygiants]

CORRECTION: they sing about democracy . . . and getting John Adams laid. Don't forget the important aspects here! (Man, I need a 1776 icon.)

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN TAKES THE CASE *_* *_* *_*

[magwana.livejournal.com]

This is true! Actually, they sing about getting laid a lot, which is something I did not realize when I saw the movie for the first time in tenth grade. It makes me love it so much more!

My library has it! Once I've worked my way through the Diana Wynne Jones oeuvre (thanks for your GIANT LIST, by the way. There are a few I hadn't read because they were out of print when I was a kid and my library didn't have them).

[skygiants]

Dude, I know! When I am feeling in need of a Founding Fathers Fix, I just go rewatch But, Mr. Adams on youtube and see Franklin, Sherman and Livingston kick-dancing and singing about sexual combustability and my day is immediately improved.

EVERYONE MUST READ ALL DWJ *cough* Uh, I mean, I am very glad that it was helpful! :D

[schiarire.livejournal.com]

*_____*

*puts books on list*

[skygiants]

Confession: I still totally love Mercedes Lackey's The Fire Rose for all the San Francisco earthquake stuff. Despite the fact that it is a.) Mercedes Lackey, b.) not good Mercedes Lackey, c.) crazy Orientalist, d.) Mercedes Lackey and not the good kind.

[nextian.livejournal.com]

Aw, I am so glad you liked it. Plus, now I really need to read the Flora Segunda books. Like, yesterday.

[skygiants]

It was pretty fascinating! It was also kind of fun to tick off the California History Landmarks that are familiar to me from fiction as they popped up - yep, there's the gold rush, there's the civil war fights at the Bella Union, there's William Randolph Hearst, there's the earthquake . . .

Also, yes, you totally do!