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Gold Rush

In 1865 the riverboat hit a snag in the Missouri River and sank on the way to goldfields in Montana. Its hull discovered in a Nebraska cornfield gave up over 200,000 artifacts.

It would be a risky trip for the two young mothers, each of them bringing along two young children. On a beautiful Spring morning, the first of April, 1865, Caroline Millard and Mary Atchison boarded the steamboat Bertrand at the docks at Omaha, Nebraska.

Save for the Civil War, what occurred after a carpenter glimpsed a flash of yellow 150 years ago was the biggest story of the nineteenth century. RICHARD REINHARDT examines what we think we know (and don’t) about the people who made it happen.

What Human nature and the California gold rush tell us about crime in the inner city

Americans have been doing just that since the days of the California gold rush—and we’re still not full

A photograph taken in New York’s Chinatown in 1933 seems to sum up the special place of Chinese restaurants in American culture.

No city has more energetically obliterated the remnants of its past. And yet no city has a greater sense of its history.

On the edge of a pond a few blocks from my home, there is a knee-high chunk of granite with a bronze plate on one side, marking the spot where a band of Spanish soldiers commanded by a captain named Juan Bautista de Anza pitched camp on a March afternoon in 1

Granddaddy of all desert mining discoveries was the Comstock Lode, which sent the Far West on a silver stampede to Nevada’s Washoe country a century ago.

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