CALIFORNIA//CHAPTER 13

California's need for a government helped promote the Progressive Movement. This movement was an effort to cure many of the ills of American society that had developed during the great spurt of industrial growth in the last quarter of the 19th century. The frontier had been tamed, great cities and businesses developed, and an overseas empire established, but not all citizens shared in the new wealth, prestige, and optimism.

Efforts to improve society were not new to the United States in the late 1800s. A major push for change, the First Reform Era, occurred in the years before the Civil War and included efforts of social activists to reform working conditions, and humanize the treatment of mentally ill people and prisoners.

Others removed themselves from society and attempted to establish utopian communities in which reforms were limited to their participants. The focal point of the early reform period was abolitionism, the drive to remove what in the eyes of many was the great moral wrong of slavery.

The second reform era began during Reconstruction and lasted until the American entry into World War I. The struggle for women's rights and the temperance movement were the initial issues addressed. A farm movement also emerged to compensate for the declining importance of rural areas in an increasingly urbanized America.

As part of the second reform period, Progressivism was rooted in the belief, certainly not shared by all, that man was capable of improving the lot of all within society. As such, it was a rejection of Social Darwinism, the position taken by many of the rich and powerful figures of the day.

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CALIFORNIA//CHAPTER 8&9

During the desperate times of the Great Depression ,handbills advertising work began to arrive in towns all along the Red River. California, the sheets said, was a land of milk and honey. Thousands of acres of rich crops awaited thousands of agricultural workers. Pay was decent and land to cultivate was available to buy. With nothing to lose, families loaded up their cars or trucks with their meager belongings and made the long drive west in search of work.

The road didn't always prove a salvation, however. Cars ran on bald tires, with rope doing makeshift duty for broken fan belts. Spare tires had to be sold for gas money. If the car broke down completely - a great possibility given that they were old and driving thousands of miles through the New Mexican and Arizona deserts - families ended up walking.
The refugees made their homes in camps alongside the road, living in tents or under cardboard. They'd eat their rations of salt pork and canned vegetables, but more often than not, women would make fried dough balls out of flour, grease, and water. Unencumbered by formal schooling, kids were free to help out by bringing in food such as frogs, squirrels, and birds. The plight of the migrants was vividly portrayed by WPA photographers like Dorothea Lange, who captured the mass migration as research for Roosevelt's relief programs.

Once in California, the refugees found limited work opportunities. They competed against thousands of others for picking jobs, at depressed wages. They also faced discrimination. With disdain, they were called "Okies," and their ways were mocked as "white trash." Migrants moved into "Okievilles" or "Little Oklahomas," shanty towns built at the edges of fields where they could live among their own kind. Black families fared even worse, as they had to wait until whites found work before they could be hired. Latino migrant workers found themselves repatriated to Mexico, although many were actually Americans!

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CALIFORNIA//CHAPTER 6&7

Josiah Royce was born November 20, 1855, in the remote mining town of Grass Valley, California, to Josiah and Sarah Eleanor Bayliss Royce. His mother was a devout Christian and head of a primary school in Grass Valley. After being educated by his mother and older sisters, at the age of eleven Royce entered school in San Francisco.
He received his B.A. in Classics from the University of California in 1875. He spent a year in Germany, where he attended philosophy lectures in Heidelberg, Leipzig, and Göttingen, mastered the language and came to admire Hermann Lotze. In

1878, the new Johns Hopkins University awarded him one of its first four doctorates, in philosophy. He then taught composition and literature at the University of California from 1878-1882, publishing a number of philosophical articles and Primer of Logical Analysis. He married Katherine Head in 1880; the couple had three sons.
In California, Royce felt isolated from the intellectual life of the East Coast, and sought an academic post there. Through the recommendation of William James, Royce's friend and philosophical antagonist, he was offered the opportunity to replace James when he took a one year sabbatical at Harvard University. Royce accepted the position at half of James’ salary, and in

1882, brought his wife and new-born son across the continent to Cambridge. There, he began to develop his interests in several areas. In 1885, he published his first major philosophical work, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, proposing that in order for ordinary concepts of truth and error to have meaning, there must be an actual infinite mind, an Absolute Knower, that encompasses all truths and all possible errors. The same year, he received a permanent appointment as assistant professor at Harvard, where he continued to teach for thirty years; among his students were T.S. Eliot, George Santayana, and W.E.B. Du Bois.

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CALIFORNIA//CHAPTER 3

California was originally a colony of Spain, and would be so for nearly three centuries. First discovered in 1542 by Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, it would claimed in the name of Spain, and would be held by Spain until the 1800's, when it would be given to Mexico. California would then be a Mexican state until 1846 when the Bear Revolt occurred, which was egged on by a US general. The hope was that California would become a part of the United States.

Like most states in the 1800's, it was originally a colony of a foreign nation, and not a member of the United States. As the United States started to grow its territory, they would run into various nations along the way, and engage in a number of wars over the territory that they wanted. The United States wished to occupy the continent from the east coast, all the way to the west coast which was referred to as Manifest Destiny. California would be claimed by several nations, and was even an independent country at one point.

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CUBA

Until the last decades of the 18th Century, Cuba was a relatively underdeveloped island with an economy based mainly on cattle raising and tobacco farms. The intensive cultivation of sugar that began at the turn of the nineteenth century transformed Cuba into a plantation society, and the demand for African "slaves", who had been introduced into Cuba from Spain at the beginning of the 16th century, increased dramatically. The slave trade with the West African coast exploded, and it is estimated that almost 400,000 Africans were brought to Cuba during the years 1835-1864. [That's roughly 1150 per month for 29 years!] In 1841, African slaves made up over 40% of the total population.

The late flourishing of the Cuban sugar industry and the persistence of the slave trade into the 1860s are two important reasons for the remarkable density and variety of African cultural elements in Cuba. Fernando Ortiz Counted the presence of over one hundred different African ethnic groups in 19th century Cuba, and estimated that by the end of that century fourteen distinct "nations" had preserved their identity in the mutual aid associations and social clubs known as cabildos, societies of free and enslaved blacks from the same African "nation," which later included their Cuban-born descendants. Soon after Emancipation in 1886, cabildos were required to adopt the name of a Catholic patron saint, to register with local church authorities and when dissolved, to transfer their property to the Catholic Church.

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DEATH IN THE ANDES

A large theme of the novel Death In The Andes, is the chaos of Latin America and how it shapes men and women into tools of that chaos. Nobody is happy, really, except perhaps Tomasito, who comes across as somewhat deluded. There is hardly a sense of future for anyone, because if you survive against today's band of rebels attacking the town, well, tomorrow's marauders might just do you in. People laugh when they are drunk or when they speak lewdly. And yet, for all that, it is not a sad world that Llosa paints. It is a country in flux, a changing place, a land for potential but also for death. It is sad to think there is little hope at the end of the novel that the violence will stop. Tomasito's love is the only spark worth sheltering, but the land, the culture, the people and the feel of Peru is captured very well. Chaos has, for a brief moment, been contained within the pages of Llosa's novel. Recommended, but only for those readers who are willing to put in the effort to untangle a novel that refuses, for the most part, to untangle at all.

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