Историк связывает золотую лихорадку в Калифорнии с формированием современной Silicon Valley и американского общества

The historian’s The Rush examines the California gold rush’s impact on American society from the Civil War to today. This book goes beyond the typical gold rush narrative. How did you determine its parameters? That challenge took me two years to solve. Yes, there’s the discovery of gold, but then there’s the issue of slavery, of the gold mines—who best to tell this story? Who are the characters to follow? An African American fugitive slave who decides, It’s too cold to go to Canada, I’ll go to California instead? A Native American journalist who learns of an Indigenous Mexican so abused in the gold mines that he turns to robbery, and who uses that story as the basis for a novel? Those are the people I need to follow. Once I identified the people, I knew it would work. You write about how the gold rush led to a world of impatient, ruthless men bent on maximizing profit, which you characterize as a more philosophical “rush” that came to dominate American society. The discovery of gold unleashed a social juggernaut driven by greed. It was strikingly modern, with tentacles that reached into the future. It’s America moving into the Gilded Age and beyond to where we are today, driven by technology, speed, the increasing velocity of life. We’re still on that hurtling train. The book ends in Silicon Valley. Did you always know you’d end there? Not in the beginning, but once I followed those tentacles, it was a straight line. The ethic of Silicon Valley was created by the gold rush. We break things, we try all sorts of stuff, failure is part of success—this approach began in the 1850s. War is commonly credited for advancing technology. It seems like your book is saying that in peacetime, greed is the catalyst. What made the gold rush such a petri dish for technology was this overriding idea that time is money—we have to maximize as much as possible because we’ll only be able to do this for a few years. In that sense, peacetime in California was warfare. They were literally battling each other and Native peoples, all while imagining, at least initially, a looming endpoint. It spurred tremendous innovation. Why this subject now? I think it’s important to look at how the gold rush impacted the rest of the country, particularly how it threw gasoline on the fire that became the Civil War. In this book, I’m trying to say, Yes, America has a revolutionary core, we were founded with ideals, and those ideals led to the Civil War, but something else happened along the way: we became a society dedicated to each person getting not just rich, but instantly rich. And maybe it’s that insane need for wealth that most defined what came after.