American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture
ana gonzalez


Brian Roberts, the author of this book, has completely different views on how the Gold Rush actually happened and who went for the gold back in “Gold fever.” He overviews the book on the typical person, which was a white rich man searching for the gold, but in reality everyone around the world went for it and especially concerning the middle-class. Mexican-Americans and Indians as well as Chileans, French, and Chinese people came over to California as woman did too even though they did not play a major part, but did help their future mans. As he explains his stories, Brain Roberts explains exactly who are the forty-niners and what they did as well as explaining the feminist and literary theory. And one of the falls of the American Alchemy was its unnecessarily contentious historic graphical bent.
Many things occurred during that time because they still had slaves which many ran away and Mexican families prospered. The way people were coming to California at the beginning was from joining a stock company which was very typical “businesslike men” looking for security of mutual protection even though others actually went for adventures knowing they would not lose anything, but gain things. (Even a wife)
Forty-niners were up to an experiment they had to do believing they would have some freedom later on and the experiments involved with the “wonderful curiosities” of new patterns of behavior. The main experiment was a blending individual striving and noncompetitive connectedness into a familial masculine over soul, but obviously it did not work.
One of the great awakening was in the period 1830’s and 1840’s because in this era people wrote poetic paeans to the power of steam, when newspapers editors could tell what they knew. Also, the second great awakening happened, it exploded into the public arena meeting, “guilty bench and were filled with crowded with merchants and civic leaders. Taking this apart, a success in business required some type of false claims, lying and cheating. Another reason of this widespread occurred was the new emphasis on self-made individualism and competition.
Women back then were treated horrible and were not even notice compared from today’s society and of they were “seen,” they were consider to be prostitutes which was a terrified statement believed. Most of the people back then believed women should just be the house wives and pleased their husbands until Eliza Woodson Farnham improved a point to their society. This book was not about just Eliza making a point, but it was one of the great stories involved in this book, but the greatest point on how women were viewed after she conquered what she was looking for. She argued that not only women had the same strengths or brains as a man, but they were better than them which caused a lot of drama, but did allow women to be seen and helped them get a man. Moreover, men questioned if they really needed a women’s help and actually came to a conclusion that they did. So after the men came from “gold fever,” they offered their woman marriage and whatever they wanted because they did not know what to do with so much money. As her ideology came down and crashed knowing many men knew her as a prude, she knew that after she was done, she helped women, but over all men form “gold fever.” The California Association of American Women was signed by many great leaders to helped her to make those who may disposed to unite with her in it, as worthy the trust and confidence necessary to its successful conduct. A woman’s usual tasks were cleaning cooking, and sewing along with keeping up kinship ties and the supervision of their children, their health, education, and discipline.
As it has been reviewed, the white rich typical men were not the ones that actually involved in the California Gold Rush, but everyone around them or more to say, everyone in the world were the ones who took the adventures to California finding more what they needed. Miners went for days in camps with their families trying to survive the conditions they were in. When this era became famous for the money it also became famous for being the “root of evil,” which made everyone go insane.