Archive for December, 2012
December Announcement for the Utah Westerners
Golden Visions: Halfway on a Long and Perilous Journey
Will Bagley
With Golden Visions Bright Before Them: Trails to the Mining West, 1849-1852 is the second of four scheduled volumes in Bagley’s acclaimed series, Overland West: The Story of the Oregon and California Trails. The first volume of this series, So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812-1848 was the recipient of several awards including Choice Magazine’s Outstanding Academic Titles of 2010 and the 2011 Western Heritage Award.
With narrative scope and detail unmatched by earlier histories, With Golden Visions Bright Before Them picks up where So Rugged and Mountainous left off, retelling this classic American saga through the voices of the people whose eyewitness testimonies vividly evoke the most dramatic era of westward migration. Traditional histories of the overland roads paint the gold rush migration as a heroic epic of progress that opened new lands and a continental treasure house for the advancement of civilization. Yet, according to Bagley, the transformation of the American West during this period is more complex and contentious than legend pretends. The gold rush epoch witnessed untold suffering and sacrifice, and the trails and their trials were enough to make many people turn back. For America’s Native peoples, the effect of the massive migration was no less than ruinous. The impact that tens of thousands of intruders had on Native peoples and their homelands is at the center of this story, not on its margins. Beautifully written and richly illustrated with photographs and maps, With Golden Visions Bright Before Them continues the saga that began with Bagley’s highly acclaimed, award-winning So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812–1848, hailed by critics as a classic of western history
Will Bagley is an independent historian who has written about overland emigration, frontier violence, railroads, mining, and the Mormons. Bagley has published extensively over the years and is the author and editor of many books, articles, and reviews in professional journals. Bagley is the series editor of Arthur H. Clark Company’s documentary history series, KINGDOM IN THE WEST: The Mormons and the American Frontier. Bagley has been a Wallace Stegner Centennial Fellow at the University of Utah and the Archibald Hannah, Jr. Fellow in American History at Yale University’s Beinecke Library. Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows has won numerous awards including a Spur Award from Western Writers of America, the Bancroft History Prize from the Denver Public Library, Westerners International Best Book, and the Western History Association Caughey Book Prize for the most distinguished book on the history of the American West. With Golden Visions Bright Before Them: Trails to the Mining West, 1849-1852 is the second of four volumes of “Overland West: The Story of the Oregon and California Trails”.
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