Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
H.W. Brands holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin. A New York Times bestselling author, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography for The First American and Traitor to His Class.
H.W. Brands's website
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Bold Type: What
prompted you to take up the story of the California gold rush?
H.W. Brands: It was really a subject I returned to. I grew up on
the West Coast in Portland, Oregon and had learned about the gold rush when
I was in school. It may get more attention in schools on the West Coast than
in the East, or at least it did when I was growing up. Now I see history
textbooks where the whole period gets one paragraph. Later when I was living
in California I would go out on weekends to visit the gold rush country. I'm
a twentieth century historian who has written a lot about the 18th century.
Another of the reasons I wanted to write about the 19th century was that
it's familiar even though it's not. A lot of the institutions and actors are
known to the readers: the Congress, the debate over slavery, the Indian wars
and the railroad. Unlike in earlier books, I don't have to spend a lot of
backstory on British court politics, for example.
BT: Your earlier book The First American used the life of Benjamin
Franklin to trace the birth and growth of a distinct American identity. The
evolution of that identity is also a theme in The Age of Gold, but the means ...
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