Leland gave up drink, fitting in with the abstemious Associates
What interests me is not so much the personal qualities of the men and women in this history but how capitalism has made use of them. To think about life this way is not to surrender to predetermination; only by understanding how we’re made use of can we start to distinguish our selves from our sit…
The point of this story isn’t that Amadeo Giannini was a bad man because he profited from stolen land. If we’re weighing hearts, his doesn’t seem to have been so bad unless you were a complacent banker, a forgivable antagonistic tendency if ever there was one. The point isn’t even that Johann Sutte…
After paying out to the easterners and Europeans who helped finance the rush of ’49, the relatively small California capitalists were looking for new opportunities. They found a big one in Nevada with the Comstock Lode’s first hit, in 1859, an exploding sequence of silver bonanzas to end all silver…
At New Almaden we can see the steps in the proletarianization dance: the alienation of indigenous and peasant populations from the land, the formal establishment of white racial rule, scientific management continually optimizing for maximum profits, looming soldiers. It all adds up to a laboring cl…
