The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World
Language: English
Published by Viking, 2026
- First Edition
- Signed
- Hardcover
- New





Seller: Haley Booksellers, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A.Haley Booksellers
AbeBooks seller since August 15, 2025
Condition: New
£ 57.75
Quantity: 2 available
Add to basketItem description from seller
RUSH by Nathaniel Philbrick (2026) BRAND NEW SIGNED 1ST EDITION 1ST PRINTING UNREAD HARDCOVER. NOT Price Clipped ($38) NOT a remainder or book club edition.Stated First Printing. This Signed Collectable Book will be Wrapped & Boxed .
Seller Inventory # 479
- Title
- The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World
- Author
- Philbrick, Nathaniel
- Publisher
- Viking
- Publication year
- 2026
- Condition
- New
- Dust jacket
- New
- Signed
- Signed by Author(s)
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0525562230
- ISBN 13
- 9780525562238
- Edition
- 1st Edition
- Printing
- 1st Printing
- Item weight
- 621 grams
- Dimensions
- 15.9 centimeters width by 23.6 centimeters height by 3.66 centimeters depth
National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In the Heart of the Sea and Mayflower, reveals how California’s Gold Rush forged the modern United States—and lit the long fuse to civil war
In January 1848, a carpenter spotted flecks of gold in a shallow stream at Sutter’s Mill in California, triggering the greatest voluntary migration in U.S. history, as hundreds of thousands raced west in pursuit of sudden wealth, reinvention, and power. From the feverish gold-mining camps of the Sierra Nevada mountains to the wharves and vigilance committees of San Francisco, Nathaniel Philbrick renders a combustible, all-world society: Chilean brothers reinventing themselves to outrun prejudice; Native communities navigating dispossession and violence; the merchant-showman Samuel Brannan, drawn into the center of early vigilantism; and the politicians vying for control of California’s future—the ambitious Free-Soil political boss David Broderick, who squared off against William Gwin, the Southern power broker intent on tilting the state toward slavery and the Confederacy.
In The Rush, Nathaniel Philbrick transforms the Gold Rush from a tale of sudden riches into the origin story of America’s modern contradictions—capital consolidated at dizzying speed, democracy in thrall to private power, xenophobia weaponized in the name of liberty—and a stubborn belief in the American experiment that refuses to die. This is the story of a nation tearing at the seams and a republic tested by its own ideals. Not until ayear after the outbreak of the Civil War, when President Lincoln signed legislation that would unite the nation east to west by building a transcontinental railroad, was California’s loyalty secured.
Philbrick follows the gold as it moves from riverbed to countinghouse to the halls of power, revealing how vigilantism hardened into law and how debates over slavery in the West tipped the balance in Washington. The result is a clear, human story of how a scramble for wealth reshaped ideas of freedom, labor, and belonging—and how California's rise helped push a fractured nation toward war. The Rush is alive with characters whose choices still reverberate: a searing, panoramic epic that captures both the fury and the promise of America.
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Haley Booksellers
Cambridge, MA, U.S.A.
AbeBooks seller since August 15, 2025
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