Golden Dreams California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963

by Starr, Kevin

• ISBN13: 9780195153774
• ISBN10: 0195153774
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-07-10
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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. Acclaim for AMERICANS AND THE CALIFORNIA DREAM series "Starr bids fair to become the foremost chronicler of that often fabulous region, imposing upon the dramatic elements of California history a novelist's imagination and a cosmopolitan and sophisticated intelligence." --Philadelphia Inquirer "An impressive book...The grasp is sure, the learning awesome. The prose...has a drive that carries cities and industries and people and decades headlong toward their manifest destiny." --The New York Times "A delightful and extremely thorough chronicle of a state that is almost a mythical kingdom. Nobody who is interested in any of the intellectual currents of American history, or of the roots of twentieth (perhaps even twenty-first) century thought, can fail to enjoy this." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch "For ambition, narrative drive and breadth of research across the disciplines from culture through politics and demography to agronomy and water management, no recent project of American historical writing comes close to Kevin Starr's mammoth, multi-volume 'Americans and the California Dream'.... It is a magnificent accomplishment." --David Rieff, Los Angeles Times Book Review "This is ebullient, nuanced, interdisciplinary history of the grandest kind, drawing parallels and distinctions where perhaps no one ever thought to see them before. Starr's a born storyteller as well, mining a rich seam of anecdotal coal to animate the complex, enigmatic figures of California history.... Starr is an undervalued and irreplaceable public treasure." --David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle

Author Biography

Kevin Starr is University Professor and Professor of History, University of Southern California, and State Librarian of California Emeritus. His Americans and the California Dream series has earned him the National Medal for the Humanities, the Centennial Medal of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University, the Gold Medal of the Commonwealth Club of California, a Guggenheim fellowship, and election to the Society of American Historians.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Suburban Assumptions
San Fernando: Homes and Happiness in Residential Subdivisions	p. 3
Designs for the Good Life: Modernism, Tiki, Ranch	p. 28
Urban Perspectives
Urban Expectations: San Diego Leverages Itself into Big-City Status	p. 57
Baghdad by the Bay: Herb Caen's San Francisco	p. 88
The Cardinal, the Chief, Walter O'Malley, and Buff Chandler: Redefining the City of Angels	p. 131
Downsides and Dividends: Los Angeles as Supercity	p. 164
Politics and Public Works
Warren, Nixon, Knight, Knowland: The Demise of Republican Centrism	p. 191
Cold War Campus: The University of California and Other Secret Places	p. 217
Freeways to the Future: An Epic of Construction on Behalf of the Automobile	p. 245
Mare Nostrum: The State Water Project	p. 267
Art and Life
Provincials, Baghdaders, and Beats: Literary San Francisco in the 1950s	p. 285
Big Sur: The Search for Alternative Value	p. 314
Silent Generation: Coming of Age on the Coast of Dreams	p. 352
Brubeck! Jazz Goes to College	p. 381
Dissenting Opinions
Largest State in the Nation: A Rebellion Against Growth and the Destruction of Environment	p. 413
People of Color: The Beginning of the End for Jim Crow California	p. 436
Cool, Not Cool: Headlines and Transitions	p. 466
Notes	p. 481
Bibliographical Essay	p. 487
Acknowledgments	p. 537
Index	p. 539
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