Reproduction of the original: Personal Reminiscense of Early Days in California With Other Sketches by Stephen J. Field

Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California, With Other Sketches by Stephen Johnson Field. This book is a reproduction of the original book published in 1893 and may have some imperfections such as marks or hand-written notes.

Who should have the right to own land, and how much of it? A Squatter's Republic follows the rise and fall of the land question in the Gilded AgeÑand the rise and fall of a particularly nineteenth-century vision of landed independence. More specifically, the author considers the land question through the anti-monopolist reform movements it inspired in late nineteenth-century California. The Golden State was a squatter's republicÑa society of white men who claimed no more land than they could use, and who promised to uphold agrarian republican ideals and resist monopoly, the nemesis of democracy. Their opposition to land monopoly became entwined with public discourse on Mexican land rights, industrial labor relations, immigration from China, and the rise of railroad and other corporate monopolies.

A highly engaging account of the developments not only legal, but also socioeconomic, political, and cultural that gave rise to Americans distinctively lawyer-driven legal culture When Americans imagine their legal system, it is the adversarial trial dominated by dueling larger-than-life lawyers undertaking grand public performances that first comes to mind. But as award-winning author Amalia Kessler reveals in this engrossing history, it was only in the turbulent decades before the Civil War that adversarialism became a defining American practice and ideology, displacing alternative, more judge-driven approaches to procedure. By drawing on a broad range of methods and sources and by recovering neglected influences (including from Europe) the author shows how the emergence of the American adversarial legal culture was a product not only of developments internal to law, but also of wider socioeconomic, political, and cultural debates over whether and how to undertake market regulation and pursue racial equality. As a result, adversarialism came to play a key role in defining American legal institutions and practices, as well as national identity.