California: A History (Modern Library Chronicles)
Kevin Starr
Language: English
Pages: 416
ISBN: 081297753X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
California has always been our Shangri-la–the promised land of countless pilgrims in search of the American Dream. Now the Golden State’s premier historian, Kevin Starr, distills the entire sweep of California’s history into one splendid volume. From the age of exploration to the age of Arnold, this is the story of a place at once quintessentially American and utterly unique.
Arguing that America’s most populous state has always been blessed with both spectacular natural beauty and astonishing human diversity, Starr unfolds a rapid-fire epic of discovery, innovation, catastrophe, and triumph.
For generations, California’s native peoples basked in the abundance of a climate and topography eminently suited to human habitation. By the time the Spanish arrived in the early sixteenth century, there were scores of autonomous tribes were thriving in the region. Though conquest was rapid, nearly two centuries passed before Spain exerted control over upper California through the chain of missions that stand to this day.
The discovery of gold in January 1848 changed everything. With population increasing exponentially as get-rich-quick dreamers converged from all over the world, California reinvented itself overnight. Starr deftly traces the successive waves of innovation and calamity that have broken over the state since then–the incredible wealth of the Big Four railroad tycoons and the devastating San Francisco earthquake of 1906; the emergence of Hollywood as the world’s entertainment capital and of Silicon Valley as the center of high-tech research and development; the heroic irrigation and transportation projects that have altered the face of the region; the role of labor, both organized and migrant, in key industries from agriculture to aerospace.
Kevin Starr has devoted his career to the history of his beloved state, but he has never lost his sense of wonder over California’s sheer abundance and peerless variety. This one-volume distillation of a lifetime’s work gathers together everything that is most important, most fascinating, and most revealing about our greatest state.
From the Hardcover edition.
The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life
The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life Is a Paid-For Experience
Kids Gone Wild: From Rainbow Parties to Sexting, Understanding the Hype Over Teen Sex
The void—in his case, the suspected emptiness of the universe itself—with his version of that perennial concern of California writers, bohemianism, which is to say, the shoring up of threatened identities through art and “hanging out.” Writers in frontier San Francisco had done this and would soon be doing it again in the Beat era; but in the meantime, William Saroyan of Fresno and San Francisco made his debut with The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories (1934), with its.
Of capitalist society, their desire for more sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, and their general antipathy for what a great big uncaring place UC Berkeley seemed to have become. Before it was over, the Free Speech Movement resulted, on the night of December 2–3, in the greatest mass arrest in California history as 750 students were hustled out of Sproul Hall, where they had been staging a sit-in. Long-term effects were even more significant: the election of Ronald Reagan to the governorship in 1966.
Decades before it might have been expected, the near-spontaneous organization of California into a state. While myth and legend might savor the folkloric image of the solitary miner, most miners lived and worked in common. They also created throughout the Mother Lode a string of mining settlements—Nevada City, Grass Valley, Dutch Flat, Georgetown, Jackson, Murphy’s Camp, Sutter’s Creek, and Sonora among them—which even today sustain a persistent and serviceable urbanism. The more strategically.
Mediterranean motifs. In 1914 a Spanish City dominated by Bertram Goodhue’s California Building was created in Balboa Park, San Diego, for the Panama California International Exposition. After the destruction of Santa Barbara by earthquake in 1925, the entire city was rebuilt in the Spanish Revival style. Mediterranean, whether Spanish or Italian in inspiration, was the architecture of choice for most public buildings in Southern California throughout this period. In the field of domestic.
All those shootings necessary? Was it necessary, moreover, to dynamite so many downtown buildings to halt the fire, or was the dynamiting the real cause of most of the destruction? Once again, Philip Fradkin has come up with bold and revisionist answers. Martial law was never officially declared, he proves. Army assistance was requested by the mayor, he asserts, and General Funston never considered that he had sole control of the city. Mayor Schmitz gave the order that looters should be shot on.