In this second part of The Schliemann Diaries we follow Heinrich Schliemann (the famous 19th century archaeologist, trader and traveller) through his diary on his second journey: his travels to America from December 1850 to March 1853. The original diary was written in English and for a small part in Spanish. This publication is a transcription and translation of Schliemann's travel diary. In 1850 the millionaire Schliemann decided to end his job as trader in Russia and to try his luck in the United States. He travelled via Europe to New York and Washington and then via Panama on to the goldfields in California. He made a second fortune in Sacramento with buying gold dust and with banking. After two years he returned to Europe and got married in St Petersburg. In this diary Schliemann describes his travels from the perspective of a wealthy business man in the mid-19th century and writes about the landscape, his visits to the theatre, the hotels he used, his much discussed meeting with the American president, his lucrative banking business in California, etc. His travels and accommodation weren't always without danger. Schliemann describes in detail the extreme heat and humidity, fatal illnesses, rainstorms, floods, mosquitoes, robbers, murderers and swindlers. Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) was a shrewd trader and later in life he became one of the best known archaeologists of the 19th century for discovering the legendary city of Troy and the golden masks of Mycenae. Schliemann also made many travels around the world and recorded his experiences in several diaries. In this series, all Schliemann's travel diaries will be made available to a wider public by means of a transcription, an English translation and an introduction. These publications will present a new image of the trader and archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann and the world in which he lived.

In this extraordinary monograph, based on a totally new array of sources, Giles Constable successfully chronicles the month-to-month, quarter-to-quarter cash transactions and other business between the Rothschild ownership and their agents in Sacramento, Benjamin Davidson and Heinrich Schliemann. In doing this, the author succeeds in presenting a case study embracing both the macroeconomics of the California Gold Rush vis-à-vis international finance as well as the microeconomics of as close as one can come to day-to-day issues of credit, cash exchange, wealth transference, insurance, and risk as experienced between 1851 and 1852. -- Back cover.

The California Gold Rush.

When The World Rushed In was first published in 1981, the Washington Post predicted, “It seems unlikely that anyone will write a more comprehensive book about the Gold Rush.” Twenty years later, no one has emerged to contradict that judgment, and the book has gained recognition as a classic. As the San Francisco Examiner noted, “It is not often that a work of history can be said to supplant every book on the same subject that has gone before it.” Through the diary and letters of William Swain--augmented by interpolations from more than five hundred other gold seekers and by letters sent to Swain from his wife and brother back home--the complete cycle of the gold rush is recreated: the overland migration of over thirty thousand men, the struggle to “strike it rich” in the mining camps of the Sierra Nevadas, and the return home through the jungles of the Isthmus of Panama. In a new preface, the author reappraises our continuing fascination with the “gold rush experience” as a defining epoch in western--indeed, American--history.

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 1948.

YOU are a New Englander with a bad case of gold fever. Gold has been discovered in California, and you want to go claim some for yourself. Will you strike it rich?

Describes adventures and disasters in the lives of people who rushed to the gold mines of California in 1848 and explains how this event sparked the state's development.