William H. Chambliss (b. 1865), a Mississippian, came to California as a member of the crew of the U.S. Essex in 1886 and made San Francisco his home base for the next five years as he shipped out on a succession of merchant vessels. He then tried to make his way in the city in advertising. Chambliss' diary (1895) describes his years at sea and voyages to Japan, China, Australia, Hawaii, and other Pacific ports of call as well as his life as a San Francisco man-about-town. The book consists largely of gossip and scurrilous rumors about leaders of San Francisco's "parvenucracy" of the late 1880s and 1890s: the Crockers and De Youngs and less-well-known pretentious upstarts, cardsharps and gambling hustlers, and society publicists like E.M. Greenway.

The growing availability of full-text books and journals on the Internet has made vast amounts of valuable genealogical information available at the touch of a button. The Genealogist's Virtual Library is a new volume that directs readers to the sites on the web that contain the full text of books.

Isaias Hellman, a Jewish immigrant, arrived in California in 1859 with very little money in his pocket and his brother Herman by his side. By the time he died, he had effectively transformed Los Angeles into the modern metropolis we see today. In Frances Dinkelspiel's groundbreaking history, the early days of California are seen through the life of a man who started out as a simple store owner only to become California's premier money-man of the late 19th and early 20th century. Growing up as a young immigrant, Hellman quickly learned the use to which "capital" could be put, founding LA's Farmers and Merchants Bank, that city's first successful bank, and transforming Wells Fargo into one of the West's biggest financial institutions. He invested money with Henry Huntington to build trolley lines, lent Edward Doheney the funds that led him to discover California's huge oil reserves, and assisted Harrison Gary Otis in acquiring full ownership of the Los Angeles Times. Hellman led the building of Los Angeles' first synagogue, the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, helped start the University of Southern California and served as Regent of the University of California. His influence, however, was not limited to Los Angeles. He controlled the California wine industry for almost twenty years and, after San Francisco's devastating 1906 earthquake and fire, calmed the financial markets there in order to help that great city rise from the ashes. With all of these accomplishments, Isaias Hellman almost single-handedly brought California into modernity. Ripe with great historical events that filled the early days of California such as the Gold Rush and the San Francisco earthquake, Towers of Gold brings to life the transformation of California from a frontier society whose economy was driven by the barter of hides and exchange of gold dust into a vibrant state with the strongest economy in the nation.

The Yearbook of Transnational History is dedicated to disseminating pioneering research in the field of transnational history. This second volume provides readers with articles on topics such as transnational marriages, exile, soccer, and missionaries as well as on the campaigns in Communist countries for freeing the American civil-rights activist Angela Davis. These articles highlight the movement of ideas, people, policies, and practices across various cultures and societies and explore the relations, connections, and spaces created by these movements. The articles in this volume explore interconnected historical phenomena in Asia, North and South America, and Europe from the late seventeenth century to the late twentieth century. These articles make clear that historical phenomena such as soccer and exile cannot be contained and explained within just one national setting. This volume also offers a theoretical article that provides insights into the concept of intercultural transfer studies and its relationship to comparative and global history. and an article that surveys the state of research in the field of transnational crime.