NorCal: 1850–1960

How the Forests Changed

The meeting of East and West on the newly competed railroad in 1869 marked the incorporation of California into national networks of trade. It also meant that Californians were no longer just an isolated colonizer society imposing a foreign world on the forests. Now they could imagine that California was just another part of one American society.

Ray Raphael’s An Everyday History of Somewhere is a 1974 book of everyday history, taking the reader for a hike around the last couple hundred years of Northern California. The book is quite pleasant to poke around in and rewards the assiduous reader with a few very insightful theses on California history. The style could be compared to Cinéma vérité or a fly-on-the-wall documentary telling…