Hello and welcome to This Day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

Welcome to Week 5 in our America 250 series, 50 weeks that shaped America all year we are looking at stories that we think are not just fascinating on their

own, but also add up in a way to the bigger story of how we got here, America's semi-Quincennial.

And this week, we look at the California Gold Rush of the late 1840s and into the 1850s.

It is a story of immense wealth and greed and the transformation of the American

West. It is also a story about speed. A mass of people and a country rushing into the hills,

rushing into a new era and rushing, eventually, I would argue, to a breaking point that would lead

to the Civil War. The California Gold Rush accelerated and exposed all of the

swirling tensions and tragedy and triumphs of the middle of the 19th century. So here to help put

the rush back in Gold Rush are, as always, Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson

of Wellesley. Hello there. Hello, Jody. Hey there. And I should say, listeners, we are not, in fact, going to rush through this. We are going to do this as we do our episodes this year in two parts. But I do want to focus on that rush part as much as the gold part because I don't know. I think the two of you know, and our listeners might know that I'm kind of obsessed with speed as kind of one of the organizing principles of understanding

history. And I kind of tend to think that most modern anxieties are actually anxieties about

speed. And this kind of really plays into that for me. And so, you know, not to get too literal

about the two words in the gold and the rush, but I'm like, the gold is interesting, but the rush part

is really intriguing. I've actually never thought about speed being a contributing or motivating factor, but it makes a lot of

sense, especially in a capitalist society where like you have to be first or you are dead last.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, and the acceleration

of change and all that the way that that redounds into politics can be pretty dramatic. Yeah,

and certainly, Kelly, it'll become pretty evident that, you know, modern American capitalism

kind of has its roots here, and this is the first proving ground for that. And so that's a big

part of it. But as I said, we're going to do it in two parts. This episode, we are going to focus on the discovery of gold, how word gets out, what that sets the stage for, for both California and the world. And the next episode, we will get into the kind of fallout of all that, both for California and different groups and the country as a whole. So that is the plan and we will get into it

right after. fallout of all that, both for California and different groups and the country as a whole.

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