by David Williams (1993)
In the 1820s a series of gold strikes from Virginia to Alabama caused such excitement that thousands of miners from all parts of the United States poured into the region. This Southern gold rush, the first in U.S. history, reached Georgia with the discovery of the Dahlonega Gold Belt in 1829. Said Benjamin Parks, one of Georgia's first twenty-niners: "The news got abroad, and such excitement you never saw. It seemed within a few days as if the whole world must have heard of it, for men came from every state I had ever heard of. They came afoot, on horseback and in wagons, acting more like crazy men than anything else. All the way from where Dahlonega now stands, to Nuckollsville there were men panning out of the branches and making holes in the hillsides." As it happened, the Georgia gold fields were found to lie in and around Cherokee territory. In 1830 Georgia extended its authority over the area, and two years later the land was raffled off in a lottery. Although they resisted this land grab through the courts, the Cherokees were eventually driven west on the Trail of Tears into what is today northeastern Oklahoma. The gold rush era survived the Cherokees in Georgia by only a few years. The early 1840s saw a dramatic decline in the fortunes of the Southern gold region. When word of a new gold strike in California reached the miners, they wasted no time in following the banished Indians westward. In fact, many Georgia twenty-niners became some of the first California forty-niners. Georgia's gold rush is now almost two centuries past, but gold fever continues. Many residents still pan for gold, and every October during Gold Rush Days hundreds of latter-day prospectors reliving the excitement of Georgia's great antebellum gold rush throng to the small mountain town of Dahlonega.
Gordon Ell
"Stories ... tell of the characters and incidents of the great gold rushes last century ... traditional information about the miners' lives, and the different ways that gold was recovered ... of the various nationalities and clashes of personalities"--P. [1].
Giannalberto Bendazzi
"... Its encyclopedic style will find it a place in the library of everyone interested in the subject." — Kirkus Reviews. "Enthusiastically recommended as both a fascinating story and an incredible reference resource for both scholars and aficionados of the art of film." —Choice. "Although animation has finally begun to be thought worthy of serious attention, the spate of books on it in recent years has focused primarily on commercial Hollywood animation. Bendazzi ambitiously attempts to fill the gap. He covers more than a century's worth of animation, from the 1888 th{‚}e{ƒ}atre optique (a device for projecting moving painted images that predates motion picture pioneers Edison and Lumi{Š}ere) to today's cutting edge computer-animation technology. He covers American animation, of course, but also describes developments in more than 70 other countries, in many of which animation emerged more as an art form than a box office draw. His work is not without shortcomings: the writing (the translation, anyway) is occasionally awkward, and despite or because of its exhaustive depth and scholarly approach, the text seldom conveys the delightfulness that makes the best cartoons so compelling. Carping aside, this valuable effort, already well received in France and Italy, promises to be the basic reference on its subject for some time to come." -- Gordon Flagg , Booklist review.
Juan Antonio Ramírez
"This work covers the many applications of art and architecture appearing in the movies produced in Hollywood from the very beginning until the fifties."--BOOK JACKET.
Phillip Drummond
Made in 1951, High Noon rapidly became one of the most celebrated and controversial Hollywood dramas of the post-war period. A grave, taut western about community and violence, High Noon collected a clutch of Oscars, helped to re-establish the dwindling fortunes of its star, Gary Cooper, and confirmed the stature of director Fred Zinnemann and producer Stanley Kramer. The film was also a flashpoint for the conflict between the US film industry and McCarthyite anti-communism: writer and associate producer Carl Foreman was hounded off the production and blacklisted. Phillip Drummond offers a detailed account of High Noon's troubled production context and its early public reception, along with career-summaries of the key participants. He analyses the dramatic organisation of the film with close reference to the original short story and Foreman's script and concludes with an invaluable overview of the long history of critical debates about High Noon, focusing on questions of social identity and gender. The result is a fresh and nuanced reading of a major classic.