Five Fires Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping of California

In this wholly original study, David Wyatt uses the metaphor of fire to tell the story of California. Wyatt focuses this catastrophic history of his native state on five events of social combustion and tangible fire that swept through California, altering its physical and political landscape and the way both were represented in art and literature. Wyatt begins with the accidental importation and spread of the wild oat in the 1770s, a process that had its human parallel in the Spanish invaders. He then explores the impact of four other significant events: the Gold Rush, the 1906 earthquake and fire, the post-World War II defense-industry boom, and the fire of race that erupted in Watts in 1965. This fifth fire, which flared throughout the Chinese and Mexican immigration experiences and the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, has been at the core of California's history, Wyatt argues. From the journals of a Gold Camp mineress to Amy Tan's novels, from Ansel Adams's photography to Roman Polanski's films, Wyatt brings into dialogue a wide range of powerful, moving voices.

David Wyatt is a professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park. He is the author of The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California and Out of the Sixties: Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation.