Nathaniel Philbrick at First Parish Church

presenting The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World in conversation with Ilyon Woo
About this Event

Harvard Book Store welcomes Nathaniel Philbrick—National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In the Heart of the Sea and Mayflower—for a discussion of his new book, The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World. He will be joined in conversation by Ilyon Woo—Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Master, Slave, Husband, Wife.

This event will be held in the First Parish Church Barn Room (Mikelson Room) on the second floor of the church. Ticket holders should enter the church at the side door located at 3 Church Street, Cambridge, MA. If you need elevator access, enter at the red door located at 1 Church Street, Cambridge and ring the bell.

Ticketing

There are two ticket options for this event.

1. Book-Included Tickets: Includes admission for one and one hardcover copy of The Rush. Following the presentation, the author will sign and personalize books (first names only).
2. Admission-Only Tickets: Includes admission for one.

Note: Books bundled with tickets may only be picked up at the venue the night of the event, and cannot be picked up in-store beforehand. Ticket holders who purchased a book-included ticket and are unable to attend the event will be able to pick up their book at Harvard Book Store up to 30 days following the event. This offer expires after 30 days. Please note we cannot guarantee signed copies will be available to ticket holders who do not attend the event.

About The Rush

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 a year 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.

Praise for The Rush

“In The Rush, Nathaniel Philbrick takes the old maxim ‘follow the money’ to an engaging and revelatory extreme. Through an intricate skein of little-known stories, he shows how the discovery of gold in California drove tectonic shifts in the way Americans thought about wealth, and about each other—and in the process fueled the Civil War and today’s mad rush toward who knows what.”—Erik Larson, author of The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War
“Like a concentrated beam of light refracted into a brilliant spectrum, Nathaniel Philbrick masterfully illuminates the forces great and small unleashed by the 1848 gold strike at Sutter’s Mill. This richly researched, vividly told narrative captures the rapacious, lawless quest for land and treasure that helped destabilized a fractured Union—and the astonishing human drama that came with it. Philbrick shows how the explosion of the frontier transformed the West, propelled a divided nation toward civil war, and opened a door through which an entire world rushed in. With an extraordinary cast—including a Chilean fortune seeker, an escaped slave, and a Southern sympathizer who rose to become a U.S. Senator from California—he gives voice to the people who were discarded, remade, and occasionally redeemed in one of the most consequential eras in American history.”—Doris Kearns Goodwin, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and author of Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
“Nathaniel Philbrick, our master storyteller, sees in the Gold Rush a Rosetta Stone for pre–Civil War America. It is a confounding and encouraging chronicle told from a myriad of perspectives, a bottom-up, epic tale of an inevitable rush toward profit and near-national suicide.”—Ken Burns, filmmaker
“With an eye for the perfect detail (sidewalks paved with beef jerky!) and a gift for the panoramic, Nathaniel Philbrick has pinned the Gold Rush, in all its wild color, to the page. Better yet, he follows it across time and across the country, to the slavery debate, the Civil War, and the transcontinental railroad. A sweeping, deeply satisfying narrative, pulsing with frontier energy.” —Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
“A rush of a narrative that will leave you giddy and full of wonder, turning pages with all the fever of a hopeful prospector. The true gold here is in the pathos beneath the glittering surface: the stories of real people; their brutal contests and conquests; and the breaching and the breaking of the natural terrain. A thrilling and valuable story of the making of America from the maestro of narrative nonfiction.” —Ilyon Woo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Master Slave Husband Wife

Bios

Nathaniel Philbrick is the author of In the Heart of the Sea, winner of the National Book Award; Mayflower, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Valiant Ambition, winner of the George Washington Prize; Bunker Hill, winner of the New England Book Award; Travels with George; Away Off Shore; Second Wind; Sea of Glory; and The Last Stand. Photo Credit: Kit Noble

Ilyon Woo is the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom—an instant New York Times best-seller, one of the New York Times “Ten Best Books of the Year,” a People Magazine “Top 10 Book of the Year,” and Kirkus Prize finalist. She is also the author of The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times. Photo Credit: Michael Wilson