DelawareScene: An Evening with Nathaniel Philbrick | The Rush @ Cape Henlopen High School

An Evening with Nathaniel Philbrick | The Rush

The History Book Festival, Lewes Public Library, and Browseabout Books are pleased to present this special evening with Nathaniel Philbrick, author of The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World, in observance of America250. A ticket is required to attend this event. Each ticket includes one general admission seat and a hardcover copy of The Rush signed by Nathaniel Philbrick.

National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Philbrick 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. 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.

This collaborative program is part of a series in observation of America250, which commemorates the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, marking America’s Semiquincentennial.

250th Anniversary History & Culture Lectures & Workshops Southern Delaware