California Dream Research Articles

The place of style in Kevin Starr's history

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.

I found a california dream job

Linda Ryder left the NHS demoralised but says it is time we stood up and fought

Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream: Gender, Class, and Opportunity in the Twentieth Century, by Glenna Matthews

<i>Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream: Gender, Class, and Opportunity in the Twentieth Century</i>, by Glenna Matthews

Water and the California Dream: Choices for the New Millennium

Journal Article Water and the California Dream: Choices for the New Millennium Get access Water and the California Dream: Choices for the New Millennium. By Carle David. (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2003. xix + 235 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. $16.95, £11.95, paper.) Donald C. Jackson Donald C. Jackson Lafayette College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 35, Issue 4, Winter 2004, Pages 527–528, https://doi.org/10.2307/25443085 Published: 01 November 2004

Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream

Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream

Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream: Gender, Class and Opportunity in the Twentieth Century

Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream: Gender, Class and Opportunity in the Twentieth Century

Reviews of Books:The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans Stephen J. Pitti; Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream: Gender, Class, and Opportunity in the Twentieth Century Glenna Matthews

Reviews of Books:The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans Stephen J. Pitti; Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream: Gender, Class, and Opportunity in the Twentieth Century Glenna Matthews

Review: Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream: Gender, Class, and Opportunity in the Twentieth Century, by Glenna Matthews

Review: <i>Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream: Gender, Class, and Opportunity in the Twentieth Century</i>, by Glenna Matthews

Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940–1950 by Kevin Starr

b o o k R e v ie w s 3 5 7 last century to distill the most representative literature fitting his carefully cho­ sen areas of focus: Native Sacred Stories, Early Exploration, Mountaineering, Natural History, and Modern Adventurers. I was naturally drawn to the mountaineering section and was happy to find Sherwonit had chosen to include a chapter from Art Davidson’s Minus 148: A Winter Ascent ofMount McKinley (1969), clearly one of mountaineering’s great­ est feats, along with the writings of the controversial Dr. Fredrick Cook and his antagonist Belmore Browne. Along this same theme, I was also very interested in the last section of the book, Modem Adventurers, which includes Daryl Miller’s “The Alaskan Mile,” an account of his winter circumnavigation of the Alaska Range. This account clearly illustrates that there is still plenty of explo­ ration left to be done even in the twenty-first century. Further evidence of the strong storytelling found in this volume is in the chapter titled “Riding the Wild Side of Denali” by sisters Miki and Julie Collins. Calling themselves the “trap line twins,” they have chosen to live and write about a “subsistence lifestyle” away from civilization, deep within the Alaskan wilderness. These are just a few of the chapters that took me, as a reader, through the Alaskan back country. Admittedly, I’m drawn to the exploration and moun­ taineering sections of the book, but there’s really something for everyone inter­ ested in the environment to be had between the covers of this book, be it wildlife biology and natural history through the writings of L. David Mech and Adolph Murie, early explorations as represented by the likes of William Dickey and Alfred Brooks, native traditions as recorded by Julius Jette and James Wickersham, mountaineering through the accounts of such giants as Bradford Washburn and Fredrick Cook, or contemporary goings-on in essays by Richard Leo and the editor himself, Bill Sherwonit. Sherwonit’s notes at the beginning of each essay strengthen this book and do a wonderful job of introducing each writer and placing each selection in context with the work from which it was extracted. This is an important con­ tribution to the canon of environmental literature and an excellent collection of stories told by their authors with all the power and spirit of the vast Alaskan wilderness. Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940-1950. By Kevin Starr. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 386 pages, $37.50/$ 18.75. Reviewed by Charles L. Crow, Professor Emeritus Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio Embattled Dreams is the sixth volume in Kevin Starr’s “California Dream” saga. The fourth, Endangered Dreams, brought California through the 1930s. The fifth, The Dream Endures, lingered at the beginning of the forties, a time when California was “complete,” the great bridges and public works in place, and the W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e F A L L 2 0 0 4 Great Depression ending. Now Starr at last plunges into World War II and its aftermath, a period of a vast upheaval, probably more so for California than for any other part of the United States. “California would never be the same,” Starr muses in his preface. “No, nothing would ever be the same” (viii, ix). The changes were deeply ambiguous, exposing the best and worst of California’s heritage. Starr’s most devastating analysis exposes a war that Cali­ fornia had waged against Japan since the beginning of the twentieth century. California’s legislature and courts regularly produced anti-Japanese laws and rulings, often in defiance of national policy. Starr suggests that the war in the Pacific was in part California’s fault, something it brought on itself, for which it illogically punished its own citizens of Japanese ancestry by incarcerating them. California is shown at its worst also in the other racial tensions of the war years, as revealed by the Zoot Suit riots and the Sleepy Lagoon murder tri­ als, and further by the loyalty oath controversy at the University of California at the...

Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream: Gender, Class, and Opportunity in the Twentieth Century

Introduction i 1. The Fruited Valley 13 2. The Fruit Industry Workforce at High Tide: A Wave of Militancy Hits the Valley 48 3. War and Cold War Shape the Valley: The Birth of a Metropolis and the Death of Union Democracy 81 4. Toward Silicon Valley 112 5. New Immigrants and Silicon Valley: Struggles, Successes, and Transformations 147 6. The Valley as Feminist Capital of the Nation I83 7. The Global Economy on the Home Front: A Tale oF Two Valleys 226

Embattled dreams: California in war and peace, 1940-1950

The sixth volume in Kevin Starr's monumental cultural history of California, Embattled Dreams 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. The book follows the story of California year by year through the decade. It starts with people leading the complacent good life on the eve of the war (1940); then the decades-long harrassment of Japanese immigrants and their culture culminating in Pearl Harbor (1941); California as a strategic centre for military training and deployment; the shameful treatment of minorities, especially Hispanics and blacks (1943); California as the arsenal of democracy, especially the significant role women played in in the aviation industry (1944); Hollywood's contributions to the war (1945); veterans' homecoming and the creation of a counterculture with Henry Miller at Big Sur (1946); crime, newspapers, film noir, Raymond Chandler and hardboiled fiction in Southern California (1947); Earl Warren as governor and dominant political figure (1948); the anti-communist movement and red baiting (1946); and the coming of the Korean War and the California career of Richard Nixon (1950). The book continues the sweep and original perceptions already well-established in Starr's series, Americans and the California Dream. Starr is a skillful storyteller, and the book has all the drive and awesome learning of his earlier books. California in the years surrounding World War II was a special story, full of dramatic change, drama and intrigue, heroism and tragedy, and the emergence of a new. more powerful role for California in the nation. Starr captures this story with his unique vision and masterful prose.

What went wrong in California's electricity market?

Abstract The California electricity market reform promised to deliver reliable service at low and stable prices. Frequent capacity shortages and the ensuing rolling black-outs, price spikes, and large price volatility since Summer 2000 raise a simple but substantive question: what went wrong? The answer to this question will help countries contemplating electricity market reform not to commit similar mistakes. We find the answer by identifying the major factors that have turned the California dream into a nightmare. Such factors include poor market design, market power, sustained demand growth not matched by new capacity, rising marginal cost, and financial insolvency. Proposed remedies include an alternative market settlement process, long-term contract, fast licensing and siting process for new generation and transmission, conservation and energy-efficiency, distributed resources, rate options, and debt restructuring. The California experience suggests that a reversible regulatory reform is a safe alternative to an irreversible market reform.

What went wrong in California's electricity market?

The California electricity market reform promised to deliver reliable service at low and stable prices. Frequent capacity shortages and the ensuing rolling black-outs, price spikes, and large price volatility since Summer 2000 raise a simple but substantive question: what went wrong? The answer to this question will help countries contemplating electricity market reform not to commit similar mistakes. We find the answer by identifying the major factors that have turned the California dream into a nightmare. Such factors include poor market design, market power, sustained demand growth not matched by new capacity, rising marginal cost, and financial insolvency. Proposed remedies include an alternative market settlement process, long-term contract, fast licensing and siting process for new generation and transmission, conservation and energy-efficiency, distributed resources, rate options, and debt restructuring. The California experience suggests that a reversible regulatory reform is a safe alternative to an irreversible market reform.

Review: FAREWELL, THE PROMISED LAND. Waking From the California Dream, by Robert Dawson and Gray Brechin

Book Review| April 01 2001 Review: FAREWELL, THE PROMISED LAND. Waking From the California Dream, by Robert Dawson and Gray Brechin FAREWELL, THE PROMISED LAND. Waking From the California DreamRobert DawsonGray Brechin Richard Steven Street Richard Steven Street Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Southern California Quarterly (2001) 83 (1): 113–116. https://doi.org/10.2307/41172061 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Richard Steven Street; Review: FAREWELL, THE PROMISED LAND. Waking From the California Dream, by Robert Dawson and Gray Brechin. Southern California Quarterly 1 April 2001; 83 (1): 113–116. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41172061 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentSouthern California Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 2001 Historical Society of Southern California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Shakespeare’s Grave: The British Fiction of Hollywood

All sorts of English oddities turn up in Hollywood. P. G. Wodehouse, The Old Reliable (51) I have a favorite quote about L.A., by William Shakespeare. He said: This other Eden, demi-Paradise,/This precious stone set in the silver sea,/This earth, this realm, this-Los L.A. Story Is Shakespeare buried in Hollywood? Steve Martin's 1991 film L.A. Story asserts that he is, explaining that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Part VIII: The Revenge during his final years in Southern California and revealing his tomb in Cemetery (right behind Paramount Studios). The scene familiarly lampoons the cultural acquisitiveness and ignorance that might allow an American to believe that Shakespeare was buried not far from the elaborate graves of Douglas Fairbanks and Tyrone Power, both of which are adorned with Goodnight, sweet prince. But Martin is not the first to locate Shakespeare's grave in Los Angeles. Aldous Huxley does it too, in his After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939). On first arriving in L.A., his main character, the scholar Jeremy Pordage, is taken to a cemetery, the Beverly Pantheon (based on Forest Lawn), where he encounters. The Tiny Church of the Poet--a miniature reproduction of Holy Trinity at Stratford-on-Avon, complete with Shakespeare's tomb and a twenty-four-hour service of organ music played automatically by the Perpetual Wurlitzer and broadcast by concealed loud speakers all over the cemetery. (10) In Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One (1948), which focuses more exclusively on Forest Lawn (here called Whispering Glades), Shakespeare is cited for frankly commercial purposes, as a mortuary hostess touts Before-Need Arrangements by saying, Hamlet so beautifully writes: 'Know that death is common; all that live must die' (53). In several other novels of by writers, Shakespeare (or another eminent representative of the literary tradition) makes an appearance--comically out of place and generally associated with mortality. As Stephen Greenblatt notes, Shakespeare has come to represent 'culture' as a whole (1), and the theme associated with Shakespeare's grave in literature often invokes other canonical texts as representative of an Anglo-European tradition to which Americans have only attenuated access (for example, Shelley functions in Huxley's Ape and Essence in much the same way Shakespeare functions in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan and Brave New World). The recur rent trope of Shakespeare's California grave encapsulates an important theme in the fiction of Hollywood: is the site of conflicts between high and low culture, between literature and film, and between tradition and American cultural acquisitiveness. (1) fiction is a regional literature of sorts, but unlike most regional literatures it is written almost entirely by outsiders, by people not native to the region. The literature of grew out of an unprecedented collision of artistic media that came about with the development of talking pictures in the late 1920s. Established novelists, journalists, and playwrights from England and the East Coast of the United States found themselves participating in the California dream as they headed west for the lucrative living supposedly available to those skilled with the written word. Some became successful screenwriters, some merely marketed their novels or plays for screen treatment, others fled in disgust or after failing in the film industry. But many of this group incorporated their experiences in into works of fiction. The term Hollywood novel commonly evokes a handful of works: Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, Fitzgerald's unfinished The Last Tycoon, and works by John O'Hara, Horace McCoy, and Budd Schul berg. But there are many more established authors who, after coming west to work in the movies, wrote books set in or Southern California, among them members of the so-called British colony. …

Review: Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream, by Robert Dawson and Gray Brechin

Review: <i>Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream</i>, by Robert Dawson and Gray Brechin

The Gold Rush and the California Dream

Research Article| April 01 1998 The Gold Rush and the California Dream Kevin Starr Kevin Starr Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (1998) 77 (1): 56–67. https://doi.org/10.2307/25462462 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kevin Starr; The Gold Rush and the California Dream. California History 1 April 1998; 77 (1): 56–67. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25462462 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1998 CHS Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Slouching Through the Great Depression: Kevin Starr and the California Dream Series

volume, making it close to unique in recent American historical publishing. Not even Richard Slotkin has dared push a series past three volumes. In an age when sagas and sequels come more naturally to Hollywood and television than to nonfiction, Starr breaks the rules. In more ways than one. For almost a quarter a century-since the 1973 publication of the title volume, Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915-Starr and his writings have had a powerful presence in California. A public figure, currently state librarian as well as professor of Urban Planning and Development at the University of Southern California, Starr enjoys a prestige that goes far beyond academia. High priest of Californiana, he is the state's unofficial Historian Laureate, chief interpreter of the California Dream. He inherited that position from Carey McWilliams, whose books California: The Great Exception (1949) and Southern California: Island on the Land (1946) dominated the study of California and its place in American history for more than a generation. It was a curious succession, almost an inversion of the expected historiographic sequence, which by the 1970s saw critical viewpoints and social historical methods replacing heroic biography and narratives of civilization building in most corners of the historical profession. McWilliams, a multicareered radical (lawyer, journalist, literary critic, public official, and, for many years, editor of The Nation) turned out a succession of books in the 1940s that included some of the best social history of his generation (North From Mexico, Brothers Under the Skin, Factories in the Field, Ill Fares the Land, Prejudice). His treatments of California's history and culture were far from the heroic narratives that usually passed for state history. Irreverent and witty, they poked holes in the founding myths, exposed charlatans and bunglers, examined closely the conquests and cruelty visited upon Indians, Mexicans, and Asians while exploring the problems of class

Noir or Gothic: Visions of Apocalypse in the Depression-era L.A. Novel

CRITICS Thirties was dark and pessimistic genre dedicated to undercutting booster myths about the Sunshine City and the California Dream. J.U. Peters speaks of Los Angeles Anti-Myth where New Jerusalem becomes New Babylon.1 Mike Davis calls this same literature LA Noir, a succession of through-the-glass darkly novels all produced by writers under contract to the studio system [that] repainted the image of Los Angeles as deracinated urban hell.2 And David Fine explains that the L.A. novelists transformed the myth of the city as El Dorado into its antithesis; that of the dream running out along the California shore... [they created] regional fiction obsessively concerned with puncturing the bloated image of Southern California as the golden land of opportunity and the fresh start.3

Great Basin Growth and the Withering of California's Pacific Idyll

For more than 150 years has gained population at the expense of other parts of the United States. The attractions highlighted climate, agricultural opportunities, employment, and a lush beckoning of spirit, style, and trend. California's nickname, the Golden State, enshrined both opportunities and attractions. Long perceived as a relatively tolerant and welcoming destination, for a century pulled in people who were sprinting from the soured economies, natural disasters, discrimination, and sundry plights of other states. By 1994 had a population of nearly 32 million and the seventh-largest economy in the world. Although has long glimmered as the promised land for an idyllic Pacific existence, no would claim that unalloyed perfection was attained. Still, the shift in sentiment during the 1990s is stunning. None of the explanations for this change is entirely satisfactory. What is clear is that the highly touted California dream is tarnished, and people seeking it are turning eastward (DRU-CA 1994b). Every western state is gaining population at the expense of California, and the Great Basin states of Nevada and Utah have proved especially popular to emigrants. With new residents and economic changes come problems and opportunities that are reshaping expectations and possibilities of the urban and rural American West. A new western order is being scripted as the territory between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra-Cascade ranges of the Pacific Rim is resettled by lifestyle refugees and job seekers moving toward an attractive and economically active urban realm [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. The intermontane western states are attracting people and enterprises that are all too disposed to evacuate a that has of late been burdened with economic crises, urban disorder, and costly natural disasters. Amenities like climate that once pulled millions of people to the Pacific Slope are now balanced by negatives such as smog, drought, valley fever, and fire. In contrast, the desert states are relatively pristine. For partisans of the Old West the legacy is uncertain. People who regard the West as a venue for unrestrained logging, grazing, prospecting, and irrigation see these lifeways and traditional economies as threatened. The primary producers whose interests once dominated see past monopolies teetering. With an influx of unfamiliar and uninformed outsiders, the old-time cliques are verging on statistical and economic insignificance; even congressional committees are examining a redress of power (HR 1994; Starrs 1994). The Great Basin is the pivot for reshaping the geography of urban, political, and natural-resource relationships in the American West, overwhelmingly at California's expense. Growth in the Salt Lake, Dixie, and eastern regions of Utah, as in Las Vegas, the western valleys, and the eastern fringes of Nevada, adds a fresh and urbane population that savors the enduring natural pleasures and expanding economic opportunities of the Great Basin. Traditional social and ethnic geographies once fundamental to life in this western realm are being changed. Local planning is compromised by an influx of wealth; traditional political constituencies are disenfranchised and outnumbered; water and other resources are strained; and the cost of growth is being questioned. These are not remote or impersonal quandaries; their resolution will affect the region well into the new century. THE CALIFORNIA EXODUS Since 1990 jobs, industries, and workers have migrated eastward from into the interior West [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. Military-base closures, businesses abandoning a state regarded as overregulated and tax-unfriendly, and growing unease about the attainability of an idyllic life along the Pacific Slope began a trend that has gained volume and velocity. By late 1992 quality-of-life surveys found residents' perceptions of had reached an all-time low, with only 30 percent considering the state one of the best places to live (Hayward 1994). …