Author: Nancy J. Taniguchi Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press ISBN: 0806157054 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 434
Book Description
The California gold rush of 1849 created fortunes for San Francisco merchants, whose wealth depended on control of the city’s docks. But ownership of waterfront property was hotly contested. In an 1856 dispute over land titles, a county official shot an outspoken newspaperman, prompting a group of merchants to organize the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance. The committee, which met in secret, fed biased stories to the newspapers, depicting itself as a necessary substitute for incompetent law enforcement. But its actual purpose was quite different. In Dirty Deeds, historian Nancy J. Taniguchi draws on the 1856 Committee’s minutes—long lost until she unearthed them—to present the first clear picture of its actions and motivations. San Francisco’s real estate comprised a patchwork of land grants left from the Spanish and Mexican governments—grants that had been appropriated and sold over and over. Even after the establishment of a federal board in 1851 to settle the complicated California claims, land titles remained confused, and most of the land in the city belonged to no one. The acquisition of key waterfront properties in San Francisco by an ambitious politician motivated the thirty-odd merchants who called themselves “the Executives” of the Vigilance Committee to go directly after these parcels. Despite the organization’s assertion of working on behalf of law and order, its tactics—kidnapping, forced deportations, and even murder—went far beyond the bounds of law. For more than a century, scholars have accepted the vigilantes’ self-serving claims to honorable motives. Dirty Deeds tells the real story, in which a band of men took over a city in an attempt to control the most valuable land on the West Coast. Ranging far beyond San Francisco, the 1856 Vigilance Committee’s activities affected events on the East Coast, in Central America, and in courts throughout the United States even after the Civil War.
Author: Frank Meriweather Smith Publisher: ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 98
Book Description
Brief history of San Francisco and its response to lawless conditions. In 1851, the citizens formed a Vigilance Committee to rid the city of criminals. It tried and hung murderers. Again in 1856, stimulated by the murder of James King of William, citizens formed another Vigilance Committee. This Committee tried and hung murders, forced many crimiinals to leave, and confronted state authority before disbanding.
Author: Darren A.. Raspa Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 149622390X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 374
Book Description
Bloody Bay recounts the gritty history of law enforcement in San Francisco. Beginning just before the California gold rush and through the six decades leading up to the twentieth century, a culture of popular justice and grassroots community peacekeeping was fostered. This policing environment was forged in the hinterland mining camps of the 1840s, molded in the 1851 and 1856 civilian vigilante policing movements, refined in the 1877 joint police and civilian Committee of Safety, and perfected by the Chinatown Squad experiment of the late nineteenth century. From the American takeover of California in 1846 during the U.S.-Mexico War to Police Commissioner Jesse B. Cook's nationwide law enforcement advisory tour in 1912 and San Francisco's debut as the jewel of a new American Pacific world during the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915, San Francisco's culture of popular justice, its multiethnic environment, and the unique relationships built between informal and formal policing created a more progressive policing environment than anywhere else in the nation. Originally an isolated gold rush boomtown on the margins of a young nation, San Francisco--as illustrated in this untold story--rose to become a model for modern community policing and police professionalism.
Author: Roger W. Lotchin Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 9780252066313 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 460
Book Description
Kathleen Gregory Klein traces female paid, professional private investigators in British, Canadian, and American novels, revealing that the detective novel is both a reflection of and potential barrier to social change for women. This edition adds sixty new female private eyes to the roster and includes an afterword that assesses the current state of the genre's new and old novels. A comprehensive bibliography and a character list update the field through mid-1994.
Author: Nancy J. Taniguchi
Author: George R. Stewart![California, from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco [1856] PDF](https://books.google.com/books/content/images/frontcover/hm4UAAAAYAAJ?fife=w80-h100)
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