The place of style in Kevin Starr's history

Abstract

Historian Kevin Starr has forged a unique style of historiography that manages not only to record and interpret but also to embody and express the energies of imagination, cultural diversity and risky experimentation he sees as the motive forces in California history. Two new works by Kevin Starr—Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge (2004) and California: A History (2005)—demonstrate the life-affirming amplitude of his historical vision. Coast of Dreams, the seventh volume in Starr's ‘Americans and the California Dream’ series deals with the thirteen-year period from 1990 to 2003. With his focus on contemporary California, Starr is more guardedly optimistic than in his previous works, with sections entitled ‘Catastrophe’ and ‘Wedge Issues’. California: A History, on the other hand, is a single-volume history of California from 1510 to the present and highlights the central paradigms of California history that Starr has spelled out in scholarly detail in the California Dream series. This chronicle also includes observations on pre-Gold Rush California, a subject that Starr has not previously addressed in any depth. California: A History offers both veteran and first-time readers of Starr's work a vivid snapshot of his writing. Both works showcase Starr's use of landscape as model and metaphor in thinking about the interactions between people and place in the Golden State. His writing displays a strong moral imagination and a flexibility of mind that demonstrates how the lines between high and low, center and periphery, subculture and mainstream become blurred, often with mercurial speed, in the social laboratory of California life.