They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush Book

I admittedly did not finish the book all the way through. It was assigned reading for my California History course, and we had our discussion on it before I finished the novel. However, I will say that I really enjoyed the layout of the book and how Levy lets the women's accounts speak for themselves, only adding her commentary when needed. That is not as common in historical works and made it much more interesting in my opinion. Levy is also able to tell a full and complete story of the Gold Rush using only women's letters and documents, which makes me question why we usually only get to read accounts from men, and why it took until 1990 when she made this novel for there to be a resource like this. I wish that more historical books had a better balance of both male and female sources in their writing. This was one of my favorite history books I have read for a class, and I will probably come back to it during summer time.