Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (Americans and the California Dream)
Brand: Oxford University Press
Categories: Books, History, Americas



Dimensions: 8.96 x 6.24 x 0.98 inches
Book 2 of 7: Americans and the California Dream
ISBN-13: 978-0195042344
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0195042344
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Print length: 416 pages
Publication date: December 4, 1986
author: Visit Amazon's Kevin Starr Page search results Kevin Starr
review: Editorial Reviews Amazon.com Review California seems to have been the source of almost every cultural trend that defines modern America--often in contradictory ways. Consider the waves of conservative and progressive politics, self-love and selflessness, sushi and Big Macs, great literature, and banal films. Inventing the Dream traces this extraordinary state through the early years of the 20th century, when Americans began to flock westward and Los Angeles grew from a town of 50,000 to a large city of 320,000 in justa couple of decades. By 1926, Starr writes, Hollywood was the United States' fifth-largest industry, grossing $1.5 billion a year and accounting for 90 percent of the world's films--and, of course, changing the values of whole cultures. This is a fine work of historical reconstruction, joining Starr's other well-regarded works of Californiana. Review "In this robust sequel to Americans and the California Dream (1973), Starr traces how Southern Californians 'defined their region to themselves and to others in the 1850-1920 period'....[Starr] persuasively presents the cultural ingredients that have made Southern California a symbol of America's continuing with health, the good life, youth, sexual vitality, and entrepreneurial success."-- Cultural Information Service "An achievement deserving respect and certain to give lasting value."-- California History "[Starr] once more provides intellectual exploration at its best."-- Pacific Historical Review "Starr has written the best explanation yet of why the land south of Tehachapi is now the country's model and pace-setter."-- Books of the Southwest "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 "Having already given us Americans and the California Dream , Kevin 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 excellent book...[V]ividly written, thoroughly researched, rich in details and alive with interesting, and sometimes incredible people."-- Los Angeles Times "Readable and intelligent."-- The New Yorker "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 From the Back Cover With the exception of certain deliberate excursions to the north, this narrative is more than half concerned with the rise of Southern California in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The focus remains, as usual, the imaginative and symbolic aspects of experience as the imagination impinges upon social and psychological realities and in turn transforms the materials of experience into the building blocks of identity. About the Author Kevin Starr is at University of San Francisco. Read more