187 - Nathaniel Philbrick, The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World

Nathaniel Philbrick is one of the most widely read narrative historians in the country. He grew up in Pittsburgh, the son of an English professor who specialized in American maritime literature, and has lived for decades on Nantucket. The island inspired In the Heart of the Sea, his National Book Award–winning account of the whaleship Essex. His other books include Mayflower, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Last Stand, on the Battle of the Little Bighorn; Why Read Moby-Dick?; and a trilogy on the American Revolution that includes Bunker Hill, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane’s Eye.

Nantucket is also where his new book began. In 1848, about a quarter of the island’s voters sailed for California and abandoned their whaling ships in San Francisco Bay, and that exodus stayed with Philbrick for more than thirty years. The result is The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World (Viking, 2026). Over five years of work, he traced California from the discovery of gold to the building of the transcontinental railroad. He argues that gold put American life into hyperspeed, creating a new impatience to get rich quickly regardless of the consequences. And by making California a free state almost overnight, gold upset the balance between slave and free states and sped the country toward civil war. At the center of the book is the rivalry between California’s first senators: William Gwin, a Southern power broker, and David Broderick, a free-soil political boss. Around them is a wide cast that includes Mary Ellen Pleasant, Thomas Starr King, William Tecumseh Sherman, David Farragut, Chilean miners, Native Californians, and Sam Brannan.

In our conversation, Philbrick explains how he approached a subject with such a large existing literature, and why the Gwin–Broderick rivalry finally unlocked the story for him. We discuss why California history so often teaches the Gold Rush and its politics separately. He makes the case that the 1856 San Francisco Vigilance Committee was a dangerous precedent rather than a civic triumph. We also cover how he weighed the evidence for Mary Ellen Pleasant’s claims about John Brown, and what Thomas Starr King meant to California’s place in the Union. He traces a straight line from 1849 to today’s AI boom. We close with Moby-Dick, Bleak House, what makes a great first page, and his next project on the Civil War in the West and the battle for the Mississippi.

Books mentioned: James Delgado, To California by Sea; H.W. Brands, The Age of Gold; Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast; Nancy Taniguchi, Dirty Deeds; Glenna Matthews, The Golden State in the Civil War; Kevin Waite, West of Slavery; Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto; Frank Norris, The Octopus.