California Transformed
Atlantic, The, May, 2002 by Benjamin Schwarz
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Since 1973 Kevin Starr has been writing a monumental, multi-volume history of California: Americans and the California Dream . Embattled Dreams , the sixth book in this work, covers only a decade, the war years and their aftermath, but this period was unquestionably the most transformative in the state's history, because it was then that California emerged as an industrial and financial colossus and as the nation's dominant social and cultural force.
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As in his other volumes, the scope of Starr's scholarship is breathtaking; this is a social, economic, political, and cultural history that covers such disparate subjects as popular San Francisco restaurants, shipbuilding, changes in domestic architecture, Raymond Chandler's fiction, the roots of anti-Japanese sentiment, baseball's Pacific Coast League, and the rise of Richard Nixon. Starr takes the long view; throughout his books he stresses continuities, rather than abrupt change. But World War II—more specifically, the federal spending that ...
