Reference no: EM133412720

1. Who was Harris Newmark, mentioned by Waldie? State something about him (cite sources). Why is he mentioned by Waldie in an essay about defining California?

Excerpt from Waldies Essay:

Far more than in Southern California in the period between the Mexican War and World War I, Northern California's story is personal, often breath- lessly epistolary, and of extraordinary volume, in part because so many gold-feverish doctors, lawyers, sea captains, shopkeepers, and tradesmen joined in the stampede into the Sierras. Prussian-born Harris Newmark, who was 19 when he came to somnambulant Los Angeles in 1853 and who learned Spanish before he learned English in order to run his store, almost alone recorded the city's commonplaces in the pre- and post-Civil War period. (Deverell has noted elsewhere that a mostly untapped record of the everyday experiences of Southern California immigrants, largely from the post-Depression period but not exclusively, lies in the personal memoirs self-published by their authors, which are found in city libraries and on sale at historical society bookshops.) By contrast, scores of energetic letter writers and journal keepers give the historian an almost cinematic view of life and manners in the diggings, making the Gold Rush one of the most written-about episodes (save for the Civil War) in American history. And yet the rush and its aftermath seem strangely absent from the ways in which Californians read their story of themselves today. As Czeslaw Milosz ruefully notes:
The truth of that bygone California, of all America, is elusive, ambiguous, and it would be pointless to seek in it myths devised to keep us from being overly troubled by the disorder of the world. . . . I have often been inclined to predict that someday a
completely different sort of Western will appear in America, a Western able to extract from the documents and annals the unre- lieved terror and strangeness of those days. But I cannot be sure, because the truth will still be opposed by the age-old tastes of the listeners, readers, viewers, who long to identify with heroes. Besides, let's be fair, those annals are full of heroism, for the most part the heroism of nameless people. (Kowalewski 1997: 445)

2. In one place, Waldie alludes to redemption (remember: "redeeming the Golden State" is part of the title of his essay). He writes:
"A great and subtle work is underway in the landscape of California, something not any less a collision with nature than the original transformation of Gold Rush California.... Ordinary men and women...have collided with the natural limits of California. Knowledge of limits makes everything inside them precious.... The collisions that Californians have had with limits have struck off hundreds of efforts to husband all the landscape within them."
First, what is Waldie getting at here, especially when he uses the term "efforts" at the end of the quotation? After unpacking his meaning here, list two other "efforts to husband all the landscape" by finding two recent articles that discuss such efforts at husbanding and preserving in California. Give us the name, title, and a link to these two articles and summarize each.