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Nathaniel Philbrick, The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World (Viking, 2026)
I try not to put too much faith in a history book’s title—as I have learned, it is all about marketing. But still, you know what they say about old habits. The full title of Nathaniel Philbrick’s new book, The Rush, promises to connect the 1849 California gold rush to the American Civil War and (as has become standard in many nineteenth-century histories) to “the making of the modern world.” The bulk of The Rush is, in fact, devoted to the gold strikes in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and its most vivid and compelling chapters track hopeful miners and those who followed them into the mountains in the late 1840s and early 1850s.
As for the rest? Well …
Philbrick is a National Book Award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of more than a dozen books. In recent years, he has turned from writing histories of seafaring to more blockbuster historical fare: the many adventures of George Washington and, now, US Western history. In the prologue, he notes that his interest in the gold rush began in Nantucket, with the story of Mary Ellen Pleasant. An entrepreneur and organizer of the Underground Railroad networks, Pleasant traveled between the East coast and the West in the 1850s, raising money for John Brown and spreading the word about the abolitionist cause. She is a fascinating and rich figure in the Black West, but despite her major role in that history—and in the origins of The Rush—we do not meet her again for more than two hundred pages.
We do meet many, many others, however, before we get back to Pleasant. More than thirty protagonists shape the story Philbrick tells. In the first year of the rush, fortune hunters come from all over the world. But as time goes on, new arrivals to California, in Philbrick’s telling, are mostly white and male and arrive from points eastward.
The rush itself ceases to be an event that is rooted in and alters the material world and instead becomes abstracted as a catalyst of political reverberations that will be familiar to most readers of US history: California statehood, growing sectionalism and strife between the North and the South, the construction of the transcontinental railroad, and the creation of a violent, technologically focused American body politic willing to abandon the past for the gilded promises of the future.
Philbrick is at his best, unsurprisingly, when he places his protagonists and his readers in boats. That might seem odd for a book about digging ore out of the ground. But sailors and ship captains played an important (and usually unacknowledged) role in transporting miners and provisioning them during the rush. The growth of San Francisco as a major port in this period involved speculation in water lots along the wharves in addition to land. There is a glorious scene depicting an impatient captain guiding his clipper ship into the Pacific Street Wharf at full sail, surging and then slowing to sidle up to the dock with “hardly a jar.” In another, a Chilean adventurer named Vincente Pérez Rosales and his three brothers clamber over a pile of boxes, shovels, guns, and sacks on a two-masted sailboat taking them from San Francisco to Sacramento.
Philbrick is at his best, unsurprisingly, when he places his protagonists and his readers in boats.
Philbrick also loves a surprising connection, a weird coincidence, and a charming anecdote. He spends three pages, for example, recounting the detailed story of a horse speculator named Edwin Sherman and his mare, Kitty, making a perilous trip up the Sacramento River. They survive the journey. In the end, however, Sherman sells his horse to finance his trip downriver to San Francisco. “But he never forgot his little mare, Kitty,” Philbrick concludes. It’s a nice story, but why tell it? There are many moments in The Rush like this; bits and bobs that don’t add up to much.
The promise to connect the rush to the Civil War, maybe even in some new way, most intrigued me. But while he does focus on California’s role in the coming of the war, Philbrick makes it to the firing on Fort Sumter quite late in the book and devotes only eighteen pages to the war itself. He gets the chronology wrong on the major battles between US troops and Confederate Texans in New Mexico and does not mention the California Column’s campaigns at all. This omission is befuddling, given that the vast majority of the two thousand enlisted soldiers in the Column were drawn from the gold fields of the Sierras. Instead of putting us on the ground with California soldiers, Philbrick seems impatient to move from the Civil War to the construction of the transcontinental railroad.
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It is at this point that The Rush goes off the rails (as it were). The narrative pacing slows and jumps back and forth in time. In the last third of the book, the world that the rush made feels more and more distant. The narrative ends, rather abruptly, with short sections on the history of photography, film, Stanford University, and artificial intelligence—the latter a “hurtling train,” according to Philbrick, taking us into the unknown.
These gestures to later rushes are well and good and will be unsurprising to scholars and enthusiastic readers of US Western history. However, the originality of the book’s larger arguments connecting California’s gold strikes to the Civil War itself and to modernity are not really the point here, and they are not what’s worth reading in The Rush. What is worth reading are the maritime scenes, the gritty details of the growing and chaotic camps and towns of California, and the life of Mary Ellen Pleasant, who reappears late in the book, traveling between the East Coast and the West and helping to establish San Francisco as “the western terminus of the Underground Railroad.” Her story is remarkable, and Philbrick tells it well.
In the prologue, Philbrick writes that his history of the gold rush will be both “intimate and panoramic.” He succeeds more with the former than the latter; readers who are looking for an expansive set of original arguments about the national or global reverberations of the gold rush will not find them here. But they will find an immersive journey through a changing nineteenth-century world.
Megan Kate Nelson is a writer, historian, and the author of five books, including The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier and the Pulitzer finalist The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West. She is also a founding editor of Drafting the Past. You can find her on Instagram at @megankatenelson and on Bluesky at @mkn.bsky.social.
Podcast Episode 118: Shane White
In this episode, Kate is joined by Dr. Shane White, the emeritus Challis Professor of History at the University of Sydney. Shane is a historian of US history, especially African American history, and has written or co-written seven books. His newest book is A Moment in the Sun: Black Manhattan Before the Civil War, and it is the product of decades of thinking and research. In it, he details the world of Black men and women in antebellum New York, bringing to life characters and moments that might otherwise be overlooked. As you’ll hear, it’s a book that emerges out of Shane’s incredibly detailed and intimate knowledge of one dense body of sources in particular, the district attorney’s records in the Municipal Archives of the City of New York, hundreds of thousands of files that date back to the 1790s. Listen to their conversation to learn about Shane’s dogged approach to research and his reflections on a career as a historian of the United States who lives and works in Australia.
