Download or read book Living the California Dream written by Alison Rose Jefferson and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2020 Miriam Matthews Ethnic History Award from the Los Angeles City Historical Society Alison Rose Jefferson examines how African Americans pioneered America’s “frontier of leisure” by creating communities and business projects in conjunction with their growing population in Southern California during the nation’s Jim Crow era.

Download or read book Americans and the California Dream 1850 1915 written by Kevin Starr and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1986-12-04 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining California's formative years, this innovative study seeks to discover the origins of the California dream and the social, psychological, and symbolic impact it has had not only on Californians but also on the rest of the country.

Download or read book Material Dreams written by Kevin Starr and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1990 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Material Dreams, Starr turns to one of the most vibrant decades in the Golden State's history, the 1920s, when some two million Americans migrated to California, the vast majority settling in or around Los Angeles. Although he treats readers to intriguing side trips to Santa Barbara and Pasadena, Starr focuses here mainly on Los Angeles, revealing how this major city arose almost defiantly on a site lacking many of the advantages required for urban development, creating itself out of sheer will, the Great Gatsby of American cities. He describes how William Ellsworth Smyth, the Peter the Hermit of the Irrigation Crusade, propounded the importance of water in Southern California's future, and how such figures as the self-educated, Irish engineer William Mulholland (who built the main aquaducts to Los Angeles) and George Chaffey (who diverted the Colorado River, transforming desert into the lush Imperial Valley) brought life-supporting water to the arid South. He examines the discovery of oil ("Yes it's oil, oil, oil / that makes LA boil," went the official drinking song of the Uplifters Club), the boosters and land developers, the evangelists (such as Bob Shuler, the Methodist Savanarola of Los Angeles, and Aimee Semple McPherson), and countless other colorful figures of the period. There are also fascinating sections on the city's architecture (such as the remarkably innovative Bradbury Building and its eccentric, neophyte designer, George Wyman), the impact of the automobile on city planning, the great antiquarian book collections, the Hollywood film community, and much more. By the end of the decade, Los Angeles had tripled in population and become the fifth largest city in the nation. In Material Dreams, Kevin Starr captures this explosive growth in a narrative tour de force that combines wide-ranging scholarship with captivating prose.

Download or read book The Dreamers written by Karen Thompson Walker and published by Random House. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • An ordinary town is transformed by a mysterious illness that triggers perpetual sleep in this mesmerizing novel from the bestselling author of The Age of Miracles. “Stunning.”—Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven • “A startling, beautiful portrait of a community in peril.”—Entertainment Weekly NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Glamour • Real Simple • Good Housekeeping One night in an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a first-year student stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep—and doesn’t wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. When a second girl falls asleep, and then a third, Mei finds herself thrust together with an eccentric classmate as panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. A young couple tries to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. Two sisters turn to each other for comfort as their survivalist father prepares for disaster. Those affected by the illness, doctors discover, are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, higher than has ever been recorded before. They are dreaming heightened dreams—but of what? Written in luminous prose, The Dreamers is a breathtaking and beautiful novel, startling and provocative, about the possibilities contained within a human life—if only we are awakened to them. Praise for The Dreamers “Walker’s roving fictive eye by turns probes characters’ innermost feelings and zooms out to coolly parse topics like reality versus delusion. . . . [It has] the perfect ambiguous frame for a tense and layered plot.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “[Walker’s] gripping, provocative novel should come with a warning: may cause insomnia.”—People (Book of the Week) “Powerful and moving . . . written with symphonic sweep.”—The New York Times Book Review “2019’s first must-read novel . . . Alternately terrifying and moving . . . The Dreamers is overflowing with humanity.”—Jezebel “This is an exquisite work of intimacy. Walker’s sentences are smooth, emotionally arresting—of a true, ethereal beauty. . . . This book achieves [a] dazzling, aching humanity.”—Entertainment Weekly

Download or read book Golden Days written by Jack McCallum and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "During their 1971-72 championship season, the L.A. Lakers won thirty-three games in a row ... a run of uninterrupted dominance that predated by decades the overwhelming firepower of today's Warriors, a revolutionary team whose recent seasons include some record-threatening win streaks of their own. Tying together the two strands [of the] story is Hall of Famer [Jerry] West, the ferociously competitive Laker guard who later became one of the key architects of the Warriors"--Amazon.com.

Download or read book Golden Dreams written by Kevin Starr and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-09 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Endangered Dreams written by Kevin Starr and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1996 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kevin Starr's portrait of California during the Great Depression is both detailed and panoramic. The study offers a vivid look at the personalities and events that shaped a decade of explosive tension.

Download or read book Embattled Dreams written by Kevin Starr and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume 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.

Download or read book The Dream Is Over written by Simon Marginson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-09-08 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The Dream Is Over tells the extraordinary story of the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California, created by visionary University of California President Clark Kerr and his contemporaries. The Master Plan’s equality of opportunity policy brought college within reach of millions of American families for the first time and fashioned the world’s leading system of public research universities. The California idea became the leading model for higher education across the world and has had great influence in the rapid growth of universities in China and East Asia. Yet, remarkably, the political conditions supporting the California idea in California itself have evaporated. Universal access is faltering, public tuition is rising, the great research universities face new challenges, and educational participation in California, once the national leader, lags far behind. Can the social values embodied in Kerr’s vision be renewed?

Download or read book Farewell Promised Land written by Robert Dawson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-12-22 with total page 927 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1999. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived

Download or read book California Dreamers written by Mark Abramson and published by Lethe Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sixth book in Abramson's popular Beach Reading mystery series set in San Francisco. Tim Snow is recruited along with other HIV patients for an experiment with Neutriva, an AIDS drug with the peculiar side effects of enhancing dreams and expanding latent psychic abilities. But is something sinister going on with these trials?

Download or read book The Orange and the Dream of California written by David Boulé and published by . This book was released on 2014-02-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively, literary and extraordinary visual look at the symbiotic and highly smbolic relationship between the Golden State and its 'golden apple'. Untold thousandsa of adventurers and health-seekers came West in the late C19th and early C20th, lured by postcards of orange blossoms on now-capped mountains. The orange became a symbol of everything California promised, and California became the centre of the Orange Empire. In 176 pages, author David Boule shares the absorbing story of the orange and its impact on the culture of California.

Download or read book The Dreamt Land written by Mark Arax and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid, searching journey into California's capture of water and soil—the epic story of a people's defiance of nature and the wonders, and ruin, it has wrought Mark Arax is from a family of Central Valley farmers, a writer with deep ties to the land who has watched the battles over water intensify even as California lurches from drought to flood and back again. In The Dreamt Land, he travels the state to explore the one-of-a-kind distribution system, built in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, that is straining to keep up with California's relentless growth. The Dreamt Land weaves reportage, history and memoir to confront the "Golden State" myth in riveting fashion. No other chronicler of the West has so deeply delved into the empires of agriculture that drink so much of the water. The nation's biggest farmers—the nut king, grape king and citrus queen—tell their story here for the first time. Arax, the native son, is persistent and tough as he treks from desert to delta, mountain to valley. What he finds is hard earned, awe-inspiring, tragic and revelatory. In the end, his compassion for the land becomes an elegy to the dream that created California and now threatens to undo it.

Download or read book California in the Movies written by Mick Lasalle and published by Heyday Books. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eminent film writer looks behind the curtain of the California dream It hardly needs to be argued: nothing has contributed more to the mythology of California than the movies. Fed by the film industry, the California dream is instantly recognizable to people everywhere yet remains evasive for nearly everyone, including Californians themselves. That paradox is the subject of longtime San Francisco Chronicle film critic Mick LaSalle's first book in nine years. The opposite of a dry historical primer, California in the Movies is a freewheeling journey through several dozen big-screen visions of the Golden State, with LaSalle's unmistakable contrarian humor as the guide. His writing, unerringly perceptive and resistant to cliché, brings clarity to the haze of Hollywood reverie. He leaps effortlessly between genres and generations, moving with ease from Double Indemnity to the first two versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Boyz N the Hood to Booksmart. There are natural disasters, heinous crimes, dubious utopias, dangerous romances, and unforgettable nights. Equally entertaining and unsettling, this book is a bold dissection of the California dream and its hypnotizing effect on the modern world.

Download or read book Journey to the Sun written by Gregory Orfalea and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The narrative of the remarkable life of Junipero Serra, the intrepid priest who led Spain and the Catholic Church into California in the 1700s and became a key figure in the making of the American West. In the year 1749, at the age of thirty-six, Junipero Serra left his position as a highly regarded priest in Spain for the turbulent and dangerous New World, knowing he would never return. The Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church both sought expansion in Mexico--the former in search of gold, the latter seeking souls--as well as entry into the mysterious land to the north called "California." By his death at age seventy-one, Serra had traveled more than 14,000 miles on land and sea through the New World--much of that distance on a chronically infected and painful foot--baptized and confirmed 6,000 Indians, and founded nine of California's twenty-one missions, with his followers establishing the rest.

Download or read book California Gothic The Dark Side of the Dream written by Charles L. Crow and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2024-01-16 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: California Gothic explores the California dream and its dark inversion as a nightmare, as illustrated in fiction, poetry, and film. California began as a literary invention, a magic island, in a Spanish romance before conquistadors first visited the land. From early days to the present, the California dream of happiness in a land of new beginnings has been maintained by suppression of disturbing realities: above all, the destruction of native peoples; and by events and facts such as the tragedy of the Donner Party, the persistence of poverty and crime in the golden land, disturbing crimes such as the Black Dahlia; and pandemics and ecological disaster. This book explores a rich Gothic tradition that exposes the repressed past and imagines the fates awaiting a failed California.

Download or read book Dreamers and Schemers written by Barry Siegel and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2020-09-14 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How one man brought the Olympics to Los Angeles, fueling the city's urban transformation. Dreamers and Schemers chronicles how Los Angeles’s pursuit and staging of the 1932 Olympic Games during the depths of the Great Depression helped fuel the city’s transformation from a seedy frontier village to a world-famous metropolis. Leading that pursuit was the “Prince of Realtors,” William May (Billy) Garland, a prominent figure in early Los Angeles. In important respects, the story of Billy Garland is the story of Los Angeles. After arriving in Southern California in 1890, he and his allies drove much of the city’s historic expansion in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Then, from 1920 to 1932, he directed the city’s bid for the 1932 Olympic Games. Garland’s quest to host the Olympics provides an unusually revealing window onto a particular time, place, and way of life. Reconstructing the narrative from Garland’s visionary notion to its consequential aftermath, Barry Siegel shows how one man’s grit and imagination made California history.