The Rush

“Like a concentrated beam of light refracted into a brilliant spectrum, Nathaniel Philbrick masterfully illuminates the forces great and small unleashed by the 1848 gold strike at Sutter’s Mill. This richly researched, vividly told narrative captures the rapacious, lawless quest for land and treasure that helped destabilized a fractured Union—and the astonishing human drama that came with it. Philbrick shows how the explosion of the frontier transformed the West, propelled a divided nation toward civil war, and opened a door through which an entire world rushed in. With an extraordinary cast—including a Chilean fortune seeker, an escaped slave, and a Southern sympathizer who rose to become a U.S. Senator from California—he gives voice to the people who were discarded, remade, and occasionally redeemed in one of the most consequential eras in American history.”
—Doris Kearns Goodwin, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and author of Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

“With characteristic eloquence and insight, Nathaniel Philbrick has given us an illuminating and absorbing account of the California Gold Rush, bringing that tumultuous, thrilling, and complex moment to vivid life. Peopled with memorable figures and paced like a great novel, The Rush is a terrific work of history.”
—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of And There Was Light

“Nathaniel Philbrick has long been one of our most elegant narrative historians, and he’s back at it again, writing at the height of his powers. The Rush brings new energy and insight to a massively consequential event we only thought we knew. In a richly pleasing weave, he gives us the micro and macro, the intimate and sweeping, and makes us care about an engaging cast of characters who sought a new life in California’s riches. Along the way, Philbrick considers how the gold rush sped up everything it touched and led directly to the restless, frenetic, hyper-adrenalized culture of today’s America.”
—Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of Blood and Thunder and The Wide Wide Sea

“Nathaniel Philbrick, our master storyteller, sees in the Gold Rush a Rosetta Stone for pre–Civil War America. It is a confounding and encouraging chronicle told from a myriad of perspectives, a bottom-up, epic tale of an inevitable rush toward profit and near-national suicide.”
—Ken Burns, filmmaker

“With an eye for the perfect detail (sidewalks paved with beef jerky!) and a gift for the panoramic, Nathaniel Philbrick has pinned the Gold Rush, in all its wild color, to the page. Better yet, he follows it across time and across the country, to the slavery debate, the Civil War, and the transcontinental railroad. A sweeping, deeply satisfying narrative, pulsing with frontier energy.”
—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

“A rush of a narrative that will leave you giddy and full of wonder, turning pages with all the fever of a hopeful prospector. The true gold here is in the pathos beneath the glittering surface: the stories of real people; their brutal contests and conquests; and the breaching and the breaking of the natural terrain. A thrilling and valuable story of the making of America from the maestro of narrative nonfiction.” —Ilyon Woo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Master Slave Husband Wife