Raising the Redwood Curtain

Labor Landscapes and Community Violence in a Pacific Littoral

By: Michael T. Karp

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Hardcover | 1 October 2025

At a Glance

Hardcover
277 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.9 x 15.2

Hardcover

$122.10

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Raising the Redwood Curtain explores how shifting land use practices and exploitative labor patterns spurred by the colonial settlement of the Pacific world influenced the genocide of California's Native people, anti-Asian campaigns, and the oppression of eastern European immigrant workers. By carefully examining these local developments, it explores how global capitalism fundamentally reordered labor patterns and social relations. By analyzing the history of three episodes of labor and racial violence in Humboldt County, California, Michael T. Karp spans nearly a century in a detailed examination of the causes and interconnections between the Indian Island massacre of 1860, the expulsion of Chinese and Japanese people from the county between 1885 and 1906, and the killing and persecution of eastern Europeans during the Great Lumber Strike of 1935. Regional labor and land use patterns shaped these events, but so did global economic developments and environmental change, connecting disparate acts of racial violence across time. By bringing together new scholarship on the American West, environmental history, and the Pacific world, Michael T. Karp illustrates the importance of considering communities on the periphery to better understand the violence that defined the colonial settlement of North America.

Industry Reviews

"Michael Karp expertly blends environmental history, labor history, and the history of race to reveal how diverse peoples' working relationships with the landscapes of California's northwestern redwood country transformed patterns of global economic exchange, migration, class conflict, and intergenerational racial violence. His extensive research and sharp analysis demonstrate that this little-known region, often dismissed as an isolated rural backwater, was essential to the construction of the U.S. settler colonial state and to the expansion of capitalism across the Pacific World."-Stacey L. Smith, author of Freedom's Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction

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