This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.

California was perhaps the most important locus for the development of the Progressive reform movement in the decades of the twentieth century. These twelve original essays represent the best of the new scholarship on California Progressivism. Ranging across a spectrum that embraces ethnicity, gender, class, and varying ideological stances, the authors demonstrate that reform in California was a far broader, more complicated phenomenon than we have previously understood. Since the 1950s, scholars have used California Progressivism as a model case study for explaining early twentieth-century social and political reform nationwide. But such a model—which ignored issues of class, race, and gender—simplified a political movement that was, in fact, quite complex. In revising the monolithic interpretation of reform and reformers, this volume provides a better understanding of the sweeping reform impulses that had such a profound effect on American political and social institutions during this century. Equally important, the issues examined here offer significant insights into problems that the entire country must tackle as we approach the new century.

This factual story about how Christopher Evans and John Sontag came to be the most wanted men in California in 1893 is also the story of life in the San Joaquin Valley at the turn of the century, where harsh realities forced rash acts that had far-reaching repercussions. Wanted for murder and train robbery, Evans and Sontag were the focus of a state-wide manhunt that reads like a Hollywood western: A U.S. marshal, Apache trackers, the California judicial system, and the one supreme power in California in the late 19th century -- the Southern Pacific Railroad -- all took a hand in creating their amazing story. The incredible history of this area of central California, now the richest agricultural area in the world, is recounted, from 25,000-acre wheat farms and the birth of the Caterpillar tractor to the development of its huge gold and silver deposits and natural gas and oil resources.