Celebrity Culture and the Gold Rush Metropolis

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy K. DeFalco Lippert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Pacific Coast ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Exchange Networks ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The City

With the gold rush, San Francisco almost instantaneously became an important stop for a host of international entertainment tours that expanded well beyond the Atlantic world, to Australia as well as the Pacific Coast. The term celebrity was first employed as a noun in the 1840s and 1850s, and from its inception, this cultural phenomenon was intrinsically linked with and profited handsomely from transnational exchange networks—the conduits for the transmission of print and visual culture, as well as the migration of people and capital. Theatrical entertainment flourished in nineteenth-century San Francisco, as did the trade in celebrity portraits. In this context, certain charismatic individuals emerged: notably female stars, including Lola Montez and Adah Isaacs Menken, who embodied the trend of self-representation that overtook the city. The celebrity thrived in a place where human identity could become a consumable commodity—in turn, it often became all-consuming..

Consent to Ascent The Baltimore Affair and the U.S. Rise to World Power Status

1984 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
Joyce S. Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Political Leader ◽  
Coastal Cities ◽  
World Power ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Commercial Center ◽  
The U.S

The city where trouble began in 1891, Valparaíso, Chile, was a memorable place. Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, the nineteenth-century Chilean historian and political leader, has rightly written that the history of Valparaíso has been the history of the sea. An old port, once a more important city than it is now, built around and especially on top of steep hills reached by rickety lifts, Valparaíso still has a grace and character unlike that of most other ports—its landscape resembles an untamed San Francisco. At one time it was a thriving commercial center and hub of naval activity, important not only for the direction of Chilean history but for that of much of South America as well. In the nineteenth century, with Chilean independence and the later decay of the Peruvian port of Callao, Valparaíso rapidly became the maritime capital of the Pacific and an important focus of naval enterprises for continental defense. Then, after decades of prosperity, its importance declined and the fortunes of other coastal cities arose.

Consuming Identities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy DeFalco Lippert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Revolving Door ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Production Methods ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
The City

Along with the rapid expansion of the market economy and industrial production methods, innovations including photography, lithography, and steam printing created a pictorial revolution in the nineteenth century. Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco explores the significance of that revolution in one of its vanguard cities: San Francisco, the revolving door of the gold rush and the hub of Pacific migration and trade. The proliferation of visual prints, ephemera, spectacles, and technologies transformed public values and perceptions, and its legacy was as significant as the print revolution that preceded it. In their correspondence, diaries, portraits, and reminiscences, thousands of migrants to the city by the Bay demonstrated that visual media constituted a central means by which to navigate the bewildering host of changes taking hold around them in the second half of the nineteenth century. Images themselves were inextricably associated with these world-changing forces; they were commodities, but they also possessed special cultural qualities that gave them new meaning and significance. Visual media transcended traditional boundaries of language and culture that had divided groups within the same urban space. From the 1848 conquest of California and the gold discovery to the disastrous earthquake and fire of 1906, San Francisco anticipated broader national transformations in the commodification, implementation, and popularity of images. For the city’s inhabitants and visitors, an array of imagery came to mediate, intersect with, and even constitute social interaction in a world where virtual reality was becoming normative.

Wide Angle: Eadweard Muybridge, the Pacific Coast, and Trans-Indigenous Representation

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-72
Author(s):  
Robert D. Aguirre
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Pacific Coast ◽  
Wide Angle ◽  
Economic Networks ◽  
Temporal Dimension ◽  
Indigenous Representation ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Important Site

Eadweard Muybridge's Pacific Coast photographs provide an important site for investigating Victorian visual practices of the “wide.” They do not simply expand a referential frame to encompass novel subjects; they also, and more critically, register powerful narratives of temporality and modernity. This essay's analysis of the “wide” as an incipient concept of critical spatiality is not set against the more familiar temporal dimension of the long nineteenth century (a false and ultimately unproductive opposition). Rather, it places these two concerns in some tension with each other, though the argument is less about periodicity than about the representation of timescales in nineteenth-century media. In Muybridge's photographs, thinking about the representational possibilities of width is impossible without also confronting temporality. The Pacific Coast photographs are important both as explorations of timescales and artifacts in an influential nineteenth-century medium and prompts to reconsider the politico-economic networks that were central to the progress of expeditionary photography itself.

The N. E. A. at San Francisco

1939 ◽  
Vol 122 (7) ◽  
pp. 229-231
Author(s):  
Belmont Farley
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Pacific Coast ◽  
National Education Association ◽  
National Education ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Education Association

Largely attended and replete with interest was this year's gathering of the National Education Association on the Pacific Coast

The Sabbath on the Overland Trail to California

1990 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 340-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Winton U. Solberg
Keyword(s):  
Mississippi River ◽  
Pacific Coast ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The World ◽  
Westward Movement ◽  
Overland Trail

The westward movement carried Americans to the banks of the Mississippi River by 1840, and in the following decade hardy pioneers began crossing the plains and mountains to settle on the Pacific coast. Gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill near present-day Sacramento on 24 January 1848, and the ensuing gold rush created a spectacle such as the world had never seen before.

scholarly journals Sediment budget analysis of the Guayas River using a process-based model

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (6) ◽  
pp. 2763-2778 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro D. Barrera Crespo ◽  
Erik Mosselman ◽  
Alessio Giardino ◽  
Anke Becker ◽  
Willem Ottevanger ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Pacific Coast ◽  
Land Reclamation ◽  
Sediment Budget ◽  
Stagnant Water ◽  
Local Perception ◽  
Budget Analysis ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The City

Abstract. The equatorial Daule and Babahoyo rivers meet and combine into the tidal Guayas River, which flows into the largest estuary on the Pacific coast of South America. The city of Guayaquil, located along the Guayas, is the main port of Ecuador but, at the same time, the planet's fourth most vulnerable city to future flooding due to climate change. Sedimentation, which has increased in recent years, is seen as one of the factors contributing to the risk of flooding. The cause of this sedimentation is the subject of the current research. We used the process-based Delft3D FM model to assess the dominant processes in the river and the effects that past interventions along the river and its estuary have had on the overall sediment budget. Additionally, a simulation including sea level rise was used in order to understand the possible future impact of climate change on the sediment budget. Results indicate an increase in tidal asymmetry due to land reclamation and a decrease in episodic flushing by river floods due to upstream dam construction. These processes have induced an increased import of marine sediment potentially responsible for the observed sedimentation. This is in contrast with the local perception of the problem, which ascribes sedimentation to deforestation in the upper catchment. Only the deposition of silt and clay in connected stagnant water bodies could perhaps be ascribed to upstream deforestation.

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