1. "The triumph of our species" : a literary analysis of three Steinbeck novellas --
2. Old California and the West --
From Sketches of eighteenth-century America / Hector St. John de Crevecoeur (1912) --
From The sunset land, or, The great Pacific slope / John Todd (1870) --
From Captain Bonneville / Washington Irving (1895) --
From "The first emigrant train to California" / John Bidwell (1890-1891) --
From The sunset land, or The great pacific slope / John Todd (1890) --
From "Agrarian justice" / Thomas Paine (1797) --
From Letters from an American farmer / Hector St. John de Crevecoeur (1912) --
From California : a study of American character / Josiah Royce (1886) --
From The Homestead Act of 1862 --
From "The lands of the United States" in The Life of Henry George / Henry George, Jr. (1900) --
From The Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act (1937) --
From Ill fares the land / Carey McWilliams (1942).
4. The vagrant farm worker : homeless in Paradise --
From The life and adventures of James P. Beckwourth ; written from his own dictation by T.D. Bonner / James P. Beckwourth (1856) --
From Scenery of the plains, mountains and mines : or a diary kept upon the overland route to California, by way of the Great Salt Lake ... in the years 1850, '51, '52 and '53 / Franklin Langworthy (1855) --
From The resources of California / John S. Hittell (1868) --
From California ... a study of American character / Josiah Royce (1886) --
From "California : character of the population" in Roughing It / Mark Twain (1892) --
From Migratory labor in American agriculture : report of the President's Commission on Migratory labor (1951) --
From The journal of a working man in John N. Webb, The migratory-casual worker (1937) --
From The hobo : the sociology of the homeless man / Nels Anderson (1923).
5. Losers of the American dream --
From One thousand homeless men / Alice Willard Solenberger (1910) --
From The hobo / Nels Anderson (1923) --
From Ill fares the land / Carey McWilliams (1942) --
From Newcomers and nomads in California / William T. Cross and Dorothy E. Cross (1937) --
From An interview with Brigadier Luther Smith of Birmingham, Alabama (1996).
6. The American dream in a Mexican setting --
From A glimpse of Old Mexico / James H. Wilkins (1901) --
From An American girl in Mexico / Elizabeth Visere McGary (1904) --
From On the Mexican highlands / William Seymour Edwards (1906) --
From Mexico with comparisons and conclusions / A.A. Graham (1907) --
From Mexico as I saw it / Mrs. Alec Tweedie (1911) --
From The real Mexico / H. Hamilton Fyfe (1914) --
From The social revolution in Mexico / Edward Alsworth Ross (1923) --