With Great Hope: Women of the California Gold Rush

I used this book to help me write a paper on women in the California Gold Rush and found the stories to be not only full of information but very entertaining as well!

This is an excellent book on the history of women during the gold rush period in Northern California. The book is a series of short biographies about several women who were key to the formation of the west as we know it today. Their successes and failures, hope and despair are all well chronicled - but kept brief and easy to read. Woven into the stories are issues that women faced, like the right to vote and working to support their families. You get a good feel for day to day life during this period. This book is inspirational for anyone today who thinks that like is hard, and would provide excellent supplemental reading for high school and college history courses. It has been painstaking researched, with information on how to learn even more.