BiblioVault - Books about Northern California

Mergers of Teaching Hospitals in Boston, New York, and Northern California

John A. Kastor

University of Michigan Press, 2003

If a teaching hospital loses funding, what is the next option?

Mergers of Teaching Hospitals in Boston, New York, and Northern California investigates the recent mergers of six of the nation's most respected teaching hospitals. The author explains the reasons why these institutions decided to change their governance and the factors that have allowed two of them to continue to operate while forcing the third to dissolve after only 23 months of operation.

The case studies contained within this book rely on an impressive amount of research. Notably, instead of citing only published articles and books, the author includes information from numerous, extensive personal interviews with key participants in the various mergers. With this research the author not only presents to the reader a picture of why these mergers came about, but also investigates how the organizations have fared since joining together. The mergers are analyzed and compared in order to identify various methods of merger formation as well as ways in which other newly formed hospitals might accomplish a variety of important goals.

Offering a spectacular account of some of the mergers that occurred in the health care field at the close of the twentieth century, these stories provide insight into academia's relationship with teaching hospitals and the challenges involved in bringing prestigious and powerful medical institutions together. The institutions discussed are Partners, the corporation which includes the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Brigham and Women's Hospital, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, the union of the New York and Presbyterian hospitals in New York City, and the UCSF Stanford, the merged teaching hospitals of the University of California, San Francisco and Stanford. This book will particularly appeal to professionals and academics interested in medicine, business, and organizational studies.

John Kastor is Professor of Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. From 1984 to 1997, he was Theodore E. Woodward Professor of Medicine and Chairman of the Department of Medicine at Maryland and Chief of the Medical Service at the University of Maryland Hospital. Dr. Kastor is also the author of Arrhythmias.

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One Shot for Gold

Developing a Modern Mine in Northern California

Eleanor Herz Swent

University of Nevada Press, 2021

Winner of the 2023 Clark Spence Award from the Mining History Association!

An account of the creation of a modern, environmentally sensitive mine as told by the people who developed and worked it.

In 1978, a geologist working for the Homestake Mining Company discovered gold in a remote corner of California’s Napa County. This discovery led to the establishment of California’s most productive gold mine in the twentieth century. Named the McLaughlin Mine, it produced about 3.4 million ounces of gold between 1985 and 2002. The mine was also one of the first attempts at creating a new full-scale mine in California after the advent of environmental regulations and the first to use autoclaves to extract gold from ore.

One Shot for Gold traces the history of the McLaughlin Mine and how it transformed a community and an industry. This lively and detailed account is based largely on oral history interviews with a wide range of people associated with the mine, including Homestake executives, geologists, and engineers as well as local neighbors of the mine, officials from county governments, townspeople, and environmental activists. Their narratives— supported by thorough research into mining company documents, public records, newspaper accounts, and other materials—chronicle the mine from its very beginning to its eventual end and transformation into a designated nature reserve as part of the University of California Natural Reserve System.

A mine created at the end of the twentieth century was vastly different from the mines of the Gold Rush. New regulations and concerns about the environmental, economic, and social impacts of a large mine in this remote and largely rural region of the state-required decisions at many levels. One Shot for Gold offers an engaging and accessible account of a modern gold mine and how it managed to exist in balance with the environment and the human community around it.

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This Land Was Mexican Once

Histories of Resistance from Northern California

By Linda Heidenreich

University of Texas Press, 2007

The territory of Napa County, California, contains more than grapevines. The deepest roots belong to Wappo-speaking peoples, a group whose history has since been buried by the stories of Spanish colonizers, Californios (today's Latinos), African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Euro Americans. Napa's history clearly is one of co-existence; yet, its schoolbooks tell a linear story that climaxes with the arrival of Euro Americans. In "This Land was Mexican Once," Linda Heidenreich excavates Napa's subaltern voices and histories to tell a complex, textured local history with important implications for the larger American West, as well.

Heidenreich is part of a new generation of scholars who are challenging not only the old, Euro-American depiction of California, but also the linear method of historical storytelling—a method that inevitably favors the last man writing. She first maps the overlapping histories that comprise Napa's past, then examines how the current version came to dominate—or even erase—earlier events. So while history, in Heidenreich's words, may be "the stuff of nation-building," it can also be "the stuff of resistance." Chapters are interspersed with "source breaks"—raw primary sources that speak for themselves and interrupt the linear, Euro-American telling of Napa's history. Such an inclusive approach inherently acknowledges the connections Napa's peoples have to the rest of the region, for the linear history that marginalizes minorities is not unique to Napa. Latinos, for instance, have populated the American West for centuries, and are still shaping its future. In the end, "This Land was Mexican Once" is more than the story of Napa, it is a multidimensional model for reflecting a multicultural past.

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The Wintu and Their Neighbors

A Very Small World-System in Northern California

Christopher Chase-Dunn

University of Arizona Press, 1998

On the cutting edge of world-systems theory comes The Wintu and Their Neighbors, the first case study to compare and contrast systematically an indigenous Native American society with the modern world at large. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines sociology, anthropology, political science, geography, and history, Christopher Chase-Dunn and Kelly M. Mann have scoured the archaeological record of the Wintu, an aboriginal people without agriculture, metallurgy, or class structure who lived in the wooded valleys and hills of northern California. By studying the household composition, kinship, and trade relations of the Wintu, they call into question some of the basic assumptions of prior sociological theory and analysis.

Chase-Dunn and Mann argue that Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems perspective, originally applied only to the study of modern capitalistic societies, can also be applied to the study of the social, economic, and political relationships in small stateless societies. They contend that, despite the fact that the Wintu appear on the surface to have been a household-based society, this indigenous group was in fact involved in a myriad of networks of interaction, which resulted in intermarriage and which extended for many miles around the region. These networks, which were not based on the economic dominance of one society over another—a concept fundamental to Wallerstein's world-systems theory—led to the eventual expansion of the Wintu as a cultural group.

Thus, despite the fact that the Wintu did not behave like a modern society—lacking wealth accumulation, class distinctions, and cultural dominance—Chase-Dunn and Mann insist that the Wintu were involved in a world-system and argue, therefore, that the concept of the "minisystem" should be discarded. They urge other scholars to employ this comparative world-systems perspective in their research on stateless societies.

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