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Author: Kevin Starr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780195168976
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420
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Book Description
This volume deals with the years of World War II and after. In the 1940s California changed from a regional centre into the dominant economic, social and cultural force it has been in America ever since.
Author: Kevin Starr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780195168976
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420
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Book Description
This volume deals with the years of World War II and after. In the 1940s California changed from a regional centre into the dominant economic, social and cultural force it has been in America ever since.
Author: Kevin Starr
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195118025
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
Kevin Starr's portrait of California during the Great Depression is both detailed and panoramic. The study offers a vivid look at the personalities and events that shaped a decade of explosive tension.
Author: Kevin Starr
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019507260X
Category : California, Southern
Languages : en
Pages : 494
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Book Description
In Material Dreams, Starr turns to one of the most vibrant decades in the Golden State's history, the 1920s, when some two million Americans migrated to California, the vast majority settling in or around Los Angeles. Although he treats readers to intriguing side trips to Santa Barbara and Pasadena, Starr focuses here mainly on Los Angeles, revealing how this major city arose almost defiantly on a site lacking many of the advantages required for urban development, creating itself out of sheer will, the Great Gatsby of American cities. He describes how William Ellsworth Smyth, the Peter the Hermit of the Irrigation Crusade, propounded the importance of water in Southern California's future, and how such figures as the self-educated, Irish engineer William Mulholland (who built the main aquaducts to Los Angeles) and George Chaffey (who diverted the Colorado River, transforming desert into the lush Imperial Valley) brought life-supporting water to the arid South. He examines the discovery of oil ("Yes it's oil, oil, oil / that makes LA boil," went the official drinking song of the Uplifters Club), the boosters and land developers, the evangelists (such as Bob Shuler, the Methodist Savanarola of Los Angeles, and Aimee Semple McPherson), and countless other colorful figures of the period. There are also fascinating sections on the city's architecture (such as the remarkably innovative Bradbury Building and its eccentric, neophyte designer, George Wyman), the impact of the automobile on city planning, the great antiquarian book collections, the Hollywood film community, and much more. By the end of the decade, Los Angeles had tripled in population and become the fifth largest city in the nation. In Material Dreams, Kevin Starr captures this explosive growth in a narrative tour de force that combines wide-ranging scholarship with captivating prose.
Author: Kevin Starr
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307795268
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 802
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Book Description
In this extraordinary book, Kevin Starr–widely acknowledged as the premier historian of California, the scope of whose scholarship the Atlantic Monthly has called “breathtaking”–probes the possible collapse of the California dream in the years 1990—2003. In a series of compelling chapters, Coast of Dreams moves through a variety of topics that show the California of the last decade, when the state was sometimes stumbling, sometimes humbled, but, more often, flourishing with its usual panache. From gang violence in Los Angeles to the spectacular rise–and equally spectacular fall–of Silicon Valley, from the Northridge earthquake to the recall of Governor Gray Davis, Starr ranges over myriad facts, anecdotes, news stories, personal impressions, and analyses to explore a time of unprecedented upheaval in California. Coast of Dreams describes an exceptional diversity of people, cultures, and values; an economy that mirrors the economic state of the nation; a battlefield where industry and the necessities of infrastructure collide with the inherent demands of a unique and stunning natural environment. It explores California politics (including Arnold Schwarzenegger’s election in the 2003 recall), the multifaceted business landscape, and controversial icons such as O. J. Simpson. “Historians of the future,” Starr writes, “will be able to see with more certainty whether or not the period 1990-2003 was not only the end of one California but the beginning of another”; in the meantime, he gives a picture of the place and time in a book at once sweeping and riveting in its details, deeply informed, engagingly personal, and altogether fascinating.
Author: Kevin Starr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199924309
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 601
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Book Description
A narrative tour de force that combines wide-ranging scholarship with captivating prose, Kevin Starr's acclaimed multi-volume Americans and the California Dream is an unparalleled work of cultural history. In this volume, Starr covers the crucial postwar period--1950 to 1963--when the California we know today first burst into prominence. Starr brilliantly illuminates the dominant economic, social, and cultural forces in California in these pivotal years. In a powerful blend of telling events, colorful personalities, and insightful analyses, Starr examines such issues as the overnight creation of the postwar California suburb, the rise of Los Angeles as Super City, the reluctant emergence of San Diego as one of the largest cities in the nation, and the decline of political centrism. He explores the Silent Generation and the emergent Boomer youth cult, the Beats and the Hollywood "Rat Pack," the pervasive influence of Zen Buddhism and other Asian traditions in art and design, the rise of the University of California and the emergence of California itself as a utopia of higher education, the cooling of West Coast jazz, freeway and water projects of heroic magnitude, outdoor life and the beginnings of the environmental movement. More broadly, he shows how California not only became the most populous state in the Union, but in fact evolved into a mega-state en route to becoming the global commonwealth it is today. Golden Dreams continues an epic series that has been widely recognized for its signal contribution to the history of American culture in California. It is a book that transcends its stated subject to offer a wealth of insight into the growth of the Sun Belt and the West and indeed the dramatic transformation of America itself in these pivotal years following the Second World War.
Author: Carlton D. Floyd
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793634122
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
The American Dream and Dreams Deferred: A Dialectical Fairy Tale shows how rival interpretations of the Dream reveal the dialectical tensions therein. Exploring often neglected voices, literatures, and histories, Carlton D. Floyd and Thomas Ehrlich Reifer highlight moments when the American Dream appears both simultaneously possible and out of reach. In so doing, the authors invite readers to make a new collective dream of a better future, on socially just, multicultural, and ecologically sustainable foundations.
Author: Jason S. Sexton
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000990400
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 155
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Book Description
An essential piece in California Studies, Redemptive Dreams: Engaging Kevin Starr’s California offers the first critical engagement with the vision of California’s most ambitious interpreter. While Starr’s multifaceted and polymathic vision of California offered a unique gaze—synthesizing central features, big themes, and incredible problems with the propitious golden dream—his eight-volume California Dream series, along with several other books and thousands of published articles and essays, often puzzled historians and other scholars. Historians in the contemporary school of critical historiography often found Starr’s narrative approach—seeking to tell the internal drama of the California story—to be less attuned to the most important work happening in the field. Such a perspective fails to acknowledge key developments in historical subfields like Black and African American Studies, Chicana/o/x Studies, Asian Studies, Native Studies, and others that draw from the narrative in their critical work and how this relates to Starr’s contribution. But it also neglects Starr as a theological interpreter. Along with being a major figure in California institutional life, with literary output spanning genres from journalism to critical cultural and political commentary, to history and memoir, Starr’s unique contribution to California Studies as a distinctly Catholic historian has yet to be adequately understood. Through his lived experience as a devout Catholic to the particular theological features of this faith tradition that animated his views, this critical sociological perspective sheds new light on his project. With contributions from sociology, history, and theology, akin to investigations appearing in Theology and California: Theological Refractions on California’s Culture (Routledge), Redemptive Dreams offers interdisciplinary perspectives that highlight key features inherent in interdisciplinary theological reflection on place and illuminates these diverse disciplinary discourses as they appear in Starr’s articulation of the California Dream. Such a vision remains important for reckoning with California’s place in the world.
Author: Elliott Robert Barkan
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253027969
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 648
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Book Description
A history of immigrants in the American West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and their effect on the region. At a time when immigration policy is the subject of heated debate, this book makes clear that the true wealth of America is in the diversity of its peoples. By the end of the twentieth century, the American West was home to nearly half of America’s immigrant population, including Asians and Armenians, Germans and Greeks, Mexicans, Italians, Swedes, Basques, and others. This book tells their rich and complex story—of adaptation and isolation, maintaining and mixing traditions, and an ongoing ebb and flow of movement, assimilation, and replenishment. These immigrants and their children built communities, added to the region’s culture, and contended with discrimination and the lure of Americanization. The mark of the outsider, the alien, the nonwhite passed from group to group, even as the complexion of the region changed. The region welcomed, then excluded, immigrants, in restless waves of need and nativism that continue to this day. “Written in the fashion of Oscar Handlin, this study makes a convincing case that immigration history comprises an essential part of the history of the American West, and that appreciation of the former and the roles played by myriad alien arrivals is essential for understanding the latter. . . . Barkan . . . combines vignettes based on immigrant reminiscences with keen analysis to explore four related themes: various groups’ arrivals, their economic influences, their effects on public policy, and their adaptation and assimilation. The resulting narrative is readable and informative. . . . Recommended.” —Choice “A remarkable synthesis of the West as a region of immigrants. It tells the story of how vital immigrants were to economic growth and modernization. This will be the prime reference for 21st century scholars of immigration and ethnicity in the American West.” —Annals of Wyoming, Spring 2010
Author: Miriam Pawel
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1632867354
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 497
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Book Description
"Miriam Pawel's fascinating book . . . illuminates the sea change in the nation's politics in the last half of the 20th century."--New York Times Book Review California Book Award Gold Medal Winner * Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize * A Los Angeles Times Bestseller * San Francisco Chronicle's "Best Books of the Year" List * Publishers Weekly Top Ten History Books for Fall * Berkeleyside Best Books of the Year * Shortlisted for NCIBA Golden Poppy Award A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist's panoramic history of California and its impact on the nation, from the Gold Rush to Silicon Valley--told through the lens of the family dynasty that led the state for nearly a quarter century. Even in the land of reinvention, the story is exceptional: Pat Brown, the beloved father who presided over California during an era of unmatched expansion; Jerry Brown, the cerebral son who became the youngest governor in modern times--and then returned three decades later as the oldest. In The Browns of California, journalist and scholar Miriam Pawel weaves a narrative history that spans four generations, from August Schuckman, the Prussian immigrant who crossed the Plains in 1852 and settled on a northern California ranch, to his great-grandson Jerry Brown, who reclaimed the family homestead one hundred forty years later. Through the prism of their lives, we gain an essential understanding of California and an appreciation of its importance. The magisterial story is enhanced by dozens of striking photos, many published for the first time. This book gives new insights to those steeped in California history, offers a corrective for those who confuse stereotypes and legend for fact, and opens new vistas for readers familiar with only the sketchiest outlines of a place habitually viewed from afar with a mix of envy and awe, disdain, and fascination.
Author: Justin Akers Chacn
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608460525
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
No One Is Illegal debunks the leading ideas behind the often-violent right-wing backlash against immigrants.
