This two-volume book is a documentary history of Russia's 19th-century settlement in California. It contains 492 documents, mostly translated from the Russian for the first time, fully annotated, and with an extensive historical introduction. This broad range of primary sources provides a comprehensive and detailed history of the Russian Empire's most distant and most exotic outpost, one whose liquidation in 1841 presaged St Petersburg's abandonment of all of Russian America in 1867.