Book Review

American Alchemy is a welcome addition to work on the California gold rush and on nineteenth-century white, middle-class culture. Brian Roberts provides rich literary analysis of letters and diaries written primarily by women who stayed in the East and men who ventured to the West. California, Roberts argues, seemed as if it might offer middle-class white men a respite from the world of competition, hierarchy, and social rigidity that, for them, characterized the era's market revolution. When that imagined respite devolved into a western version of the industrializing East and such men realized that they would not return home with gold aplenty, they had to rethink the meaning of their sojourn. Meanwhile, for women left behind to manage not only households but also farms and businesses, the rush revealed new arenas for female competence and reminded all that "woman's place" was not so much the home as it was the space between home and market. Over time, white men gave their own experience a particular meaning—neither escape nor success, but rather hard-won failure that proved their manliness. Eventually, this became the meaning of the gold rush, overshadowing the simultaneous experience of women and its possible meanings.

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