By [Your Name/Journalist Name] Published September 2026 The history of the United States is often taught as a series of disparate chapters: the westward expansion, the existential crisis of the Civil War, the industrial revolution, and the eventual digital hegemony of Silicon Valley. However, in his sweeping and provocative new work, The Rush: California Gold, […]

Introduction On a cold Monday morning in January 1848, a carpenter and sawmill operator named James W. Marshall noticed a glint of yellow in the tailrace of the mill he was constructing for John Sutter. That solitary flake of gold, discovered in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, was the pebble that started an avalanche. […]