| Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era Contributor(s): Starr, Kevin (Author) |
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ISBN: 0195042344 ISBN-13: 9780195042344 Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA OUR PRICE: $36.09 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: December 1986 Annotation: 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. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Popular Culture - History | United States - State & Local - General |
| Dewey: 979.4 |
| Lexile Measure: 1500 |
| Series: Americans and the California Dream |
| Physical Information: 0.98" H x 6.24" W x 8.96" (1.38 lbs) 416 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Western U.S. - Geographic Orientation - California - Cultural Region - West Coast |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: This second volume in Kevin Starr's passionate and ambitious cultural history of the Golden State focuses on the turn-of-the-century years and the emergence of Southern California as a regional culture in its own right. How hauntingly beautiful, how replete with lost possibilities, seems that Southern California of two and three generations ago, now that a dramatically diferent society has emerged in its place, writes Starr. As he recreates the lost California, Starr examines the rich variety of elements that figured in the growth of the Southern California way of life: the Spanish/Mexican roots, the fertile land, the Mediterranean-like climate, the special styles in architecture, the rise of Hollywood. He gives us a broad array of engaging (and often eccentric) characters: from Harrision Gray Otis to Helen Hunt Jackson to Cecil B. DeMille. Whether discussing the growth of winemaking or the burgeoning of reform movements, Starr keeps his central theme in sharp focus: how Californians defined their identity to themselves and to the nation. |