American Alchemy

“An important work within the context of gold rush studies.” — Enterprise & Society

“A welcome addition to work on the California gold rush and on nineteenth-century white, middle-class culture. Brian Roberts provides rich literary analysis of letters and diaries. . . . [Roberts] is magnificent. No other historian has read these letters and diaries with such keen insight, nor has anyone else captured the contradictions and conceits of white middle-class culture so effectively.” — Journal of American History

“Offers a fresh look at a familiar episode in U.S. history. . . . An impressive addition to scholarship on nineteenth-century American culture and class formation. [This book] demands the attention of historians in a number of fields and should influence our understanding of the Gold Rush for some time to come.” — Journal of the Early Republic

“[This book] achieves a ”gold standard“ by making something as familiar as the Gold Rush uncomfortably new. By chipping away at an old story and rearranging the pieces into rich new narratives . . . Roberts remind[s] us how differently important big events are and that historians have a responsibility to give voice to the ways in which these stories can be remembered.” — American Historical Review

“An important book, convincingly relocating the opening cultural crisis of the American middle class from the turn of the century back to the late 1840s.” — Harvard Business History Review

“[A] refreshing approach to the fabled era of the California gold rush. . . . This book raises questions and provides answers.” — CHOICE

“Brian Roberts makes fascinating use of his evidence — the letters and journals of forty-niners and their kith and kin back home. The gold rush, he argues, operated as a kind of boot-camp for the emerging American middle class, offering men an opportunity to steel themselves for the rough and tumble world of the marketplace. For the 'gold rush widows' left behind, the experience was equally important in encouraging a new kind of independence.” — John Mack Faragher, Yale University