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This book examines the origins of California surface water law in the earliest years of statehood: the decade of the 1850’s. This decade was dominated by a key event in California history, the Gold Rush. The Gold Rush comprised a major exogenous shock to the California economy, resulting in tremendous economic and population growth within an extremely short period of time, along with significant structural changes to the economy. Importantly, the Gold Rush caused a dramatic increase in the demand for water, a key factor input into placer mining. The increased use of water led to a large number of disputes among miners over its use, which set into motion a series of changes in how water rights were defined and how disputes over water rights were to be resolved. The emergence of California water law was a complex process that contained both formal and informal elements. A key component of the picture was the creation of basic legal principles within a network of mining camps. Many of these principles were subsequently incorporated into the official system of water law as promulgated by the courts. This book examines legal developments that governed disputes in three key areas: diversions of water, water quality, and dam failures. The resulting principles were broadly consistent with attempts to maximize rents within local water basins, including the minimization of various components of transaction costs, including enforcement and measurement costs.

Between the late 1700s and the 1920s, nearly one-third of the world's Jews emigrated to new lands. Crossing borders and often oceans, they followed paths paved by the intrepid peddlers who preceded them. This book tells the remarkable story of the Jewish men who put packs on their backs and traveled forth, house to house, farm to farm, mining camp to mining camp, to sell their goods to peoples across the world. Persistent and resourceful, these peddlers propelled a mass migration of Jewish families out of central and eastern Europe, north Africa, and the Ottoman Empire to destinations as far-flung as the United States, Great Britain, South Africa, and Latin America. This book tells the story of millions of discontented young Jewish men who sought opportunity abroad, leaving parents, wives, and sweethearts behind. Wherever they went, they learned unfamiliar languages and customs, endured loneliness, battled the elements, and proffered goods from the metropolis to people of the hinterlands. In the Irish Midlands, the Adirondacks of New York, the mining camps of New South Wales, and so many other places, these traveling men brought change—to themselves and the families who later followed, to the women whose homes and communities they entered, and ultimately to the geography of Jewish history.

This book traces black vocal music instruction and inspiration from the halls of Fisk University to the mining camps of Birmingham and Bessemer, Alabama, and on to Chicago and New Orleans. In the 1870s, the Original Fisk University Jubilee Singers successfully combined Negro spirituals with formal choral music disciplines, and established a permanent bond between spiritual singing and music education. Early in the twentieth century there were countless initiatives in support of black vocal music training conducted on both national and local levels. The surge in black religious quartet singing that occurred in the 1920s owed much to this vocal music education movement. In Bessemer, Alabama, the effect of school music instruction was magnified by the emergence of community-based quartet trainers who translated the spirit and substance of the music education movement for the inhabitants of working-class neighborhoods. These trainers adapted standard musical precepts, traditional folk practices, and popular music conventions to create something new and vital. Bessemer’s musical values directly influenced the early development of gospel quartet singing in Chicago and New Orleans through the authority of emigrant trainers whose efforts bear witness to the effectiveness of “trickle down” black music education. A cappella gospel quartets remained prominent well into the 1950s, but by the end of the century the close harmony aesthetic had fallen out of practice, and the community-based trainers who were its champions had virtually disappeared, foreshadowing the end of this remarkable musical tradition.