A Self-Governing Dominion: California, 1849-1860

A Self-governing Dominion: California, 1849–1860 by William Henry Ellison traces California’s turbulent political evolution from the framing of its first constitution to the factional battles that culminated on the eve of the Civil War. Ellison interprets the decade as a formative era when Californians, spurred by circumstance and necessity, developed a strong ethos of self-rule—sometimes cooperative, often contentious, but always marked by a determination to assert autonomy in shaping loca...