California's Channel Islands

This is a remarkable book in its completeness of research, its format, and its elegant writing style. Author Frederic Caire Childs, himself a descendent of a Santa Cruz Island family, describes California’s Channel Islands as a history, and it is surely that: an exhaustively researched history (despite the relative brevity of the book) based in an array of sources, its narrative enlivened by family histories, similar to his own family history, in each of the eight islands of the channel. As such, this history—which moves from island to island, from San Miguel to San Clemente, through successive eras of geological formation, flora, and fauna development (to include dwarf mammoths and other oddities of evolution in isolation); Native American life (Chumash in the main but a separate people on San Nicolas related to the tribes of the Great Basin, the Southwest, and central Mexico); and the Spanish, Mexican, and American eras—will dominate the field.

Archaeology · Art · Channel (broadcasting) · Ethnology · Fauna · Flora (microbiology) · Genealogy · Geography · Isolation (microbiology) · Literature · Narrative · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Ecology · Geology · History · History of Science and Medicine · History of Science and Natural History · Paleontology