New Releases by Gordon Morris Bakken

""Examines the 1894 Wells Fargo scam involving money packets falsely purported to contain $25,000. The plan goes awry and leads to the death of a sheriff and undercover agent; uncovers the identities of the masterminds"--Provided by publisher"--

World History: A Concise Thematic Analysis presents the highly anticipated second edition of the most affordable and accessible survey of world history designed for use at the college level. This text offers a comparative analysis of great civilizations of Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas in an engaging narrative that contextualizes history instead of drowning students in a sea of facts. Themes addressed include population dynamics, food production challenges, disease history, warfare, and others. Instructor resources are available online for this text. This new edition of World History: A Concise Thematic Analysis features a newly-designed interior organization to enhance navigation and comprehension of the material. An instructors' test bank is available online.

Bakken traces the roots of the mining law and details the way its unintended consequences have shaped western legal thought from Nome to Tombstone.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a revolutionary period in the lives of women, and the shifting perceptions of women and their role in society were equally apparent in the courtroom. Women Who Kill Men examines eighteen sensational cases of women on trial for murder from 1870 to 1958. The fascinating details of these murder trials, documented in court records and embellished newspaper coverage, mirrored the changing public image of women. Although murder was clearly outside the norm for standard female behavior, most women and their attorneys relied on gendered stereotypes and language to create their defense and sometimes to leverage their status in a patriarchal system. Those who could successfully dress and act the part of the victim were most often able to win the sympathies of the jury. Gender mattered. And though the norms shifted over time, the press, attorneys, and juries were all informed by contemporary gender stereotypes.

This fresh departure from other California history readers offers students a compilation of engaging essays designed to complement any standard California history textbook or stand on its own as a progressive core text. The work of ten experts, this book presents interpretive examinations of an ecletic range of topics seldom, if ever, considered in standard texts, making it a welcome choice of supplementary reading for the full range of courses in California history.

The first of its kind, Learning California History is a dynamic workbook designed to complement any of the standard California history textbooks currently available. Much more than supplementary reading, this innovative teaching and student assessment tool introduces students to basic social science research methods, using carefully designed exercises and historical documents to enhance the reading, research, and writing skills of students of all levels.

In Practicing Law in Frontier California Gordon Morris Bakken combines collective biography with an analysis of the function of the bar in a rapidly changing socioeconomic setting. Drawing on manuscript collections, Bakken considers hundreds of men and women who came to California to practice law during the gold rush and later, their reasons for coming, their training, and their usefulness to clients during a period of rapid population growth and social turmoil. He shows how law practice changed over the decades with the establishment of large firms and bar associations, how the state's boom-and-bust economy made debt collection the lawyer's bread and butter, and how personal injury and criminal cases and questions of property rights were handled. In Bakken's book frontier lawyers become complex human beings, contributing to and protecting the social and economic fabric of society, expanding their public roles even as their professional expertise becomes more narrowly specialized.

Bakken addresses important issues of constitutional history in the context of a seminal period in the history of the American West. He describes the challenges which faced the participants in eight Western constitutional conventions. His analysis answers questions of how consensus was reached and how that consensus reflected the compromise between the particular needs of the states and fundamental principles. Bakken outlines the issues of public policy which the constitution makers faced: issues ranging from resource allocation and taxation to the role of corporations in the community. He also explains how the delegates attempted to express the values of their constituencies while striving to define the concept of the public good.

This is a thought-provoking exploration of the development of civil law in California from 1850 to 1890. Focusing upon contract, landlord and tenant, mortgage, tort, and admiralty law, Bakken argues that the formulation of the law generally responded to socioeconomic forces. He also asserts that on the operational level, the law's reach was limited by ambiguities, judicial inexactitude, and mistakes made by the bar. Essentially, the broad policy goals of frontier law worked to stimulate marketplace forces by facilitating certain transactions. Entrepreneurs often received the aid of the developing law, but were frustrated by it at other times. Bakken scrutinizes the role of judges, legislators, lawyers, and laymen in contributing to this process. Finally, he demonstrates that the law was less certain and the policy considerations less clear when the law actually functioned on an operational level in society.