Item Detail
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27708
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0
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0
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English
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"This Strange and Sistant Land:" Isolation, Problem Groups, and the Incorporation of California, 1846-1882
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Los Angeles, California
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University of Southern California Los Angeles
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Dissertation
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This thesis examines the course of several attempts by both the federal government and California’s people to incorporate the state into the national fabric and identity during the mid to late nineteenth century. Some events, particularly the Mexican-American War and the Civil War, conjured a number of significant questions about its fitness for full membership in the national community of states. Others, including the Gold Rush, the Compromise of 1850, and the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 all attempted and failed to bridge this gap, largely due to California’s isolation. The federal government's capitulation to the demands of the state’s opposition to immigration from China in the form of the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in May 1882. Seizing on a historical moment of uncertainty – the retreat from the racially egalitarian promises of radical Reconstruction – the Far West inserted its agenda onto the national stage, and the nation validated its interpretation of white supremacy in Gilded Age America.