Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping of CaliforniaIn this wholly original study, David Wyatt uses the metaphor of fire to tell the story of California. Wyatt focuses this catastrophic history of his native state on five events of social combustion and tangible fire that swept through California, altering its physical and political landscape and the way both were represented in art and literature. Wyatt begins with the accidental importation and spread of the wild oat in the 1770s, a process that had