Norwegian writer Karin Sveen, author of The Immigrant and the University: Peder Sather and Gold Rush California (University of California Press, 2014), tells the story of a poor Norwegian farm boy who achieves the American dream: Peder Sather was living on a farm in a remote corner of Norway when he immigrated to the U.S. in 1832 and made a large fortune that he then used to found the University of California, Berkeley.
The Immigrant and the University will be available for signing and purchase after the program.
About Peder Sather and the book
Peder Sather was a scribe before he emigrated from Norway to New York in 1832. There, he worked as a servant and a clerk at a lottery office before opening an exchange brokerage. During the gold rush, he moved to San Francisco to help establish the banking house of Drexel, Sather & Church on Montgomery Street. Sather was a founder and a liberal benefactor of the University of California, Berkeley, where he is memorialized by the Sather Gate and Sather Tower (the Campanile), three endowed professorships, and more recently the Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study.
The book offers readers a look at the life of a successful entrepreneur and a leading patron of California who engaged in all levels of public education; supported Abraham Lincoln; and worked to give emancipated slaves housing, schooling, and employment after the Civil War. Sather’s legacy, vivid persona, and the frontier city of his time are brought to life with interesting anecdotes of many famous people – General William T. Sherman, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Norwegian violinist Ole Bull, and above all, his close friend Anthony J. Drexel, legendary Philadelphia financier and one of the founders of Wall Street.
To purchase the book: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520276482
About the author
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Photo by the American-Scandinavian Foundation
MON – 10-27-14 – 6:30 PM
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