Web Site Review

This review appears in the June 2005 issue of the JAH, 324-25.

"California as I Saw It": First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849–1900 <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/cbhtml/cbhome.html>. Library of Congress, National Digital Library Program: American Memory Project. Reviewed Oct. 2004.

"California as I Saw It" contains searchable full-text digital versions of 190 publications of primary sources from nineteenth-century California. It was the first major project undertaken by the Library of Congress's massive National Digitization Library Program, the centerpiece of which is the magnificent American Memory Web site. " California as I Saw It" is enhanced by useful bibliographic material introducing each text, an overview of pre-twentieth-century California history, a large map, a reading list, descriptions of the collection, and a link to the library's excellent teaching resource, The Learning Page.

These full-text digital versions of books from the library's general and rare book collections are particularly valuable because one can search the texts. The search engine is excellent and fast, allowing keyword searches of the titles and introductory information, as well as of the full texts. It is somewhat cumbersome to get to the Web site since it takes four clicks from the library's home page to get to the " California as I Saw It" page. Once there, however, the Web site is relatively easy to navigate through indices of titles, subjects, and authors.

The 190 books of " California as I Saw It" are a small selection of the library's collection of primary material on nineteenth-century California. They were chosen to provide a focused collection of searchable materials—thus the concentration on printed first-person narratives. Not surprisingly, the collection is strongly oriented toward the gold rush, primarily because there are so many more surviving first-person accounts from that period than from later periods. There are, however, good selections from the last half of the century, including the memoirs of Hubert Howe Bancroft, the nineteenth-century Californian historian, and John Muir, the famous conservationist. There is a substantial bias toward the writing of white male Americans; the explanatory material traces the bias to the decision to limit the collection to printed, first-person accounts in English and the dearth of such books by non-Americans and by women. In spite of this limitation, there are several strange omissions, including the well-known memoirs of Sarah Royce and English-language translations of books written by gold rushers from other countries.

One of the problems of the collection is that it has not been updated since its completion in 1997. There has been a great deal of work on nineteenth-century California in the past seven years, much of it concerning the role of women in the gold rush and the experiences of non-American immigrants to the state. The reading list and the synopsis of California history are out-of-date and would be misleading to students beginning a study of California history. Unfortunately, library staff told me in an interview in September 2004 that there are currently no plans to update the site. Overall, in spite of the need to update and expand the material, the collection is a excellent resource for the teacher, student, and researcher.

Richard Stillson
George Mason University
Fairfax, Virginia