Thomas Steinbeck's short story collection Down to a Soundless Sea won high praise from critics and readers everywhere. Now, he continues the family tradition of fascinating storytelling in his first full-length novel In the Shadow of the Cypress, which showcases his splendidly assured voice and exquisite eye for cultural detail. In 1906, Doctor Charles H Gilbert, a Stanford professor of marine biology discovers some ancient jade artefacts on California's Monterey Peninsula. The existence of these sacred stones, if authenticated, would indicate a very early Asian presence in the New World, an idea that conflicts with modern beliefs. When the Chinese fishing village where the artefacts were discovered is completely burned to the ground, there are many conflicting opinions about the proper fate of these artefacts. Eventually, a wealthy businessman agrees to pay for the stones to be transported back to China - but a tragic explosion on the boat occurs and the relics are lost at sea...until nearly a hundred years later when two young scholars join forces and attempt to locate the sunken treasure. With superb attention to cultural detail, Steinbeck brings to vivid light the Chinese immigrant experience at turn of the century California, juxtaposing complex ancient rituals against contemporary customs with the grace, passion and authority of a master.
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• CONTRIBUTORS:William DeverellTom SittonAnne F. HydeMary Ann MasonGerald WoodsSherry KatzJudith RafteryMary OdemDouglas FlammingGeorge J. SanchezJackson K. Putnam.
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Embracing issues of ethnicity, gender and ideology, this collection of essays demonstrates how California was an important focus for the development of the progressive reform movement in the USA during the early part of the 20th century.
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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.
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• Prophetic patterns, 1786-1850
• Beyond Eldorado
• City on a hill
• A rapid, monstrous maturity
• "Because I am a Californian": the loyalities of Josiah Royce
• Sport, mountaineering, and life on the land
• The Sonoma finale of Jack London, rancher
• Bohemian shores
• The city beautiful and the San Francisco Fair
• Life among the best and truest: David Starr Jordan and the founding of Stanford University
• Gertrude Atherton, daughter of the elite
• An American Mediterranean
• Americans and the California dream.

In the late nineteenth century, California became "the cutting edge of the American dream, " the final frontier both geographically and in the minds of the many men and women who went there to pursue their destinies. In this fascinating volume Keven Starr examines California's formative years to discover the origins of the California dreams and the social, psychological, and symbolic impact it has had not only on Californians but on the rest of the country.
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