Book Release: Californians in Colonial America

If you are researching ancestors in Southern California, here are 9 essays that describe early life in several different voices.

We pass this on for our friends at the Huntington Library Press:

Alta California: Peoples in Motion, Identities in Formation, 1769-1850
Edited by: Steven W. Hackel

Spanish California—with its diverse mix of Indians, soldiers, settlers, and missionaries—provides a fascinating site for the investigation of individual and collective identity in colonial America. Through innovative methodologies and extensive archival research, the nine essays in this volume reshape our understanding of how people in the northernmost Spanish Borderlands viewed themselves and remade their worlds. Essays examine Franciscan identity and missionary tactics in Alta California, Sonora, and the Sierra Gorda; Spanish and Mexican settlers’ identity as revealed in mission records, family relationships, political affiliations, and genetic origins; and Indian identity as shown in mission orchestras and choral guilds as well as in the life of Pablo Tac, a Luiseño who penned his own remembrance of the Spanish conquest of Alta California. The concluding essays examine the identity and historiography of the field of the Spanish Borderlands as it has developed over the last century in North America and Spain.

Huntington Library Press
Established in 1920, the Huntington Library Press is one of Southern California's oldest book publishers. Its current publishing agenda includes a quarterly journal for scholars and a mixture of scholarly books, conference papers, exhibition catalogs, facsimiles from its collections, and visitor publications.