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There is an interesting article on Fort Hope in the July 2007 SLO COUNTY JOURNAL, p.16. Also of historical note is a piece on the 600 year old barn resurrection on page 22.
 

Newsletters, Magazines and Catalogs

Common Ground, Spring 2008: Preserving Our Nation's Heritage, includes "Seeding California," a beautifully illustrated account of William Mulholland's Los Angeles Aqueduct project. Common Ground is a high quality free quarterly magazine, published by the National Park Service. To subscribe or read on line visit www.cr.nps.gov/CommonGround. The Spring 2008 issue includes "Seeding California," a beautifully illustrated account of William Mulholland's Los Angeles Aqueduct project.

Common-Place, an on-line history magazine, has a special issue titled Revolution in Print: Graphics in Nineteenth Century America. The whole issue is highly recommended, but HS website visitors might find the following articles especially compelling:

-- Gary L. Bunker, The Art of Condecension: Postbellum Caricature and Woman Suffrage"
-- Katharine Martinez, "The Dickinsons of Amherst Collect: Pictures and their Meanings in a Victorian Home"
-- Deirdre Murphy, ""'Like Standing on the Edge of the World and Looking into Heaven:' Picturing Chinese Labor and Industrial Velocity in the Gilded Age"
-- Jonathan Prude, "Engaging Urban Panoramas: City Views of the Antebellum North"
-- Sue Rainey, "Picturesque California: How Westerners Portrayed the West in the Age of John Muir" -- Wendy Wick Reaves, "'Reading' Portrait Prints: New Ways of Seeing Old Faces"

Journal Plus: Magazine of the Central Coast, a free publication that regularly publishes local history pieces by Joe Carotenuti and others. Visit their website, www.slojournal.com, or call 805 546-for more information. We are particularly enjoying Joseph Carotenuti's continuing, deeply researched, well-written explorations of SLO history each month. His articles thus far this year are "Living History, A Conversation with Robert Brown" (January); "The San Luis Obispo County Seal," (February); "The Anza Trail" (March); "History From a Bus" (April); "The Call to California, Part I" (May); "The Call to California, Part II" (June).

Books

Three excellent, eminently readable books on subjects that could easily be difficult:

1491, Charles Mann
A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
Oil on the Brain, Lisa Margonelli

Fire in California's Ecosystems.  2006. Sugihara, N.G., J.W. Van Wagtendonk, K.E. Shaffer, J. Fites-Kaufman, and A. E. Thode, editors. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.  596 pages. (Chapter 14 is entirely devoted to the "Central Coast Bioregion.")
 

Fractal Architecture: Design for Sustainability, 2007. Ken Haggard and Polly Cooper. BookSurge Publishing. 

Quote from book:

 "The old adage 'architecture is frozen music' would be better stated in the context of fractal geometry as: 'architecture is music at a myriad of time scales.' Certainly architecture is not frozen in time. From the start of construction, the decay of buildings is a slow but inevitable process. The time of day and season bring different aspects of lighting and temperature characteristics to structures. Buildings viewed as objects frozen in space is an industrial era abstraction that is not only false, but so simplistic as to disconnect buildings from a great deal of aesthetic response.

"Stravinsky said: 'in music, only the now counts.' We could say that in architecture many nows count--short-term nows, long-term nows--all being counted at once. Architecture as an environmental art is therefore more complex, and often less pure, due to the multiplicity of users and players. However, if orchestrated well, architecture can have the aesthetic impact of music." Contact the San Luis Sustainability Group for more information.

Hard Road West: History and Geology Along the Gold Rush Trail, Keith Heyer Meldahl

Historical Atlas of California: With Original Maps, Derek Hayas. University of California Press, 2007, 256 pages.

This atlas tells the story of California's past from a unique perspective. It is lavishly illustrated with approximately 500 maps and many other illustrations. The illustrations are accompanied by extended captions and concise narrative. The work is unique because only historical maps and other adornments were utilized in contrast to existing atlases that are comprised mainly of new cartographic materials. This is a beautiful atlas that is instructive and a pleasure to view.

Immigration at the Golden Gate: Passenger Ships, Exclusion, and Angel Island, Robert Eric Barde, Praeger/Greenwood Press, March 2008.

Angel Island is both an important piece of American history and a metaphor for the immigration process on the West Coast. To illuminate the many facets of the Chinese immigration experience in California in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Barde follows the various threads of one Chinese female immigrant’s 20-month detention on Angel Island. Her experience was extraordinary—not only in being the longest known detention at the Immigration Station, but in being connected to so many important events and central characters in immigration through the Golden Gate. Her tale is chillingly relevant to today’s debates over exclusion and detention.

The author is Deputy Director of the Institute of Business and Economic Research at the University of California, Berkeley. With Susan Carter and Richard Sutch, he is author of the “International Migration” chapter for the Millennial Edition of Historical Statistics of the United States. His writings on immigration history include articles for Social Science History and the Journal of the History of Medicine. Before working for UC Berkeley, Barde made documentary films on Africa for educational television in Canada, founded a gallery of modern African art, and earned a black belt in karate. He holds a graduate degree in Political Economy from the University of Toronto. His book, Immigration at the Golden Gate: Passenger Ships, Exclusion, and Angel Island, was published by .

Many of his writings on immigration, African art, and karate are available on his webpage http://staff.haas.berkeley.edu/barde/_public/

Peak Everything: Waking up to the Century of Declines, Richard Heinberg, New Society Publishers, 2007   Pages: 200

Richard Heinberg has written three books on peak oil and his new work widens the environmental and resource scope of his forecasts. He provides compelling evidence that the limits we all have been hearing about for decades are really upon us. He also hints at the directions we may take to escape or adjust to resource limitations.

Point Piedras Blancas, an Images of America book by Arcadia Publishing, docent Carole Adams.

For thousands of years, Point Piedras Blancas, located along the central coast of California, has attracted people to its rocky, windswept shores. In ancient times, it was used by Native American cultures. Since 1875, it has been the site of a First Order Lighthouse, warning ships to steer clear of its rocky shoals, a duty it continues to fulfill. Although the years have not been kind to this stunning area nor to the lighthouse, new life is being breathed into it by a partnership of enthusiastic community volunteers and government agencies. Their common goal is to restore this magnificent site to its original state while reintroducing the natural environment that was almost obliterated during the past four decades. Authors Carole Adams and John Bogacki are both deeply involved with the efforts to restore Point Piedras Blancas. Adams is a volunteer at the Piedras Blancas Light Station, and Bogacki is a former site manager. They have created a visual representation of the story of Point Piedras Blancas using photographs, illustrations, and architectural drawings that are part of the Bureau of Land Management Piedras Blancas Light Station Collection. The authors’ proceeds go to the Piedras Blancas Light Station Association for restoration and education.

Paperback: 128 pages, Arcadia Publishing (June 9, 2008)m ISBN-10: 0738558192, $15.59. Available through Amazon.com.  

State Boundaries of America is an original book detailing the formation of each state of the United States.

From the introduction:

"The United States - the What and the Where is well known: watch any network national weather broadcast. Here is explained the Who, When and (as possible) Why from as wide a variety of sources as possible.

An atlas of the USA is useful reference when reading this; adding a historical atlas would be ideal. The USA is a layer cake of interstate boundaries in most cases laid down over many years. The intent here is to provide a cross-referenced dataset showing literally the portions of original text in Royal Charters, Royal Grants, International Treaties, and US Territorial or Federal Statutes spanning 300+ years that laid down the lines as we see them in 2006. "

(Click title for more information.)

Testimonios: Early California Through the Eyes of Women, 1815-1848. 2006. Translated with introduction and commentary by Rose Marie Beebe and Robert m. Senkewicz. Heyday Books, Berkeley, California.

The book is comprised of thirteen women's firsthand accounts from the time when California was part of Spain and Mexico. Many of these chronicles come from women who lived in San Luis Obispo and nearby lands.

Kevin Starr describes (on the dust jacket) the book this way: "Testimonios is a pioneering work of scholarship and critical interpretation by two of the finest Hispanicists active in early California studies. It is also a deeply moving act of liberation in which thirteen women are called forth from the tomb of neglected history so that they might at long last speak to us of their lives and times and the California they helped bring into being."