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 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 Orange Empire written by Douglas Cazaux Sackman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Douglas Sackman peels an orange and finds inside nothing less than an American agricultural-industrial culture in all its inventive, exploitative, transformative, and destructive power. A beautifully researched and intellectually expansive book."—Elliott West, author of The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, & the Rush to Colorado
Download or read book California s Citrus Heritage written by Benjamin T. Jenkins and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2021-11-08 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the first appearance of oranges at the Franciscan missions in the early 19th century, citrus agriculture has been an inextricable part of California's heritage. From the 1870s to the 1960s, oranges and lemons were dominant features of the Southern California landscape. The Washington navel orange, introduced by homesteader Eliza Tibbets at Riverside in the 1870s, precipitated the rise of a citrus belt stretching from Pasadena (in the San Gabriel Valley) to Redlands (in San Bernardino County). Valencia oranges dominated Orange County south of Los Angeles, while lemons thrived in coastal settlements such as Santa Paula. With the arrival of transcontinental railroads in the citrus heartland by the 1880s, Californians had access to markets across the United States. This was followed by the subsequent establishment of an impressive central organization in the form of the California Fruit Growers Exchange, and oranges became the state's most lucrative crop. Observers did not exaggerate when they dubbed the southern portion of the Golden State an orange empire.
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 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 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 California Dreamin Along Route 66 written by Joe Sonderman and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2019 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The California Dream made Route 66 the most famous road in the world. Flappers dreamed of stardom under the bright lights of Hollywood. A wave of families fleeing the Dust Bowl transformed the state during the Great Depression. During World War II, another wave followed Route 66 seeking opportunity in the massive wartime industrial plants. Thousands of soldiers trained in the Mojave Desert and then returned amid the postwar prosperity to blossoming housing developments that replaced the vast orange groves. While Nat King Cole sang "(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66," the newly prosperous middle class hit the road headed for the dream land constructed by Walt Disney. Inspired by the Beat poets, the hippies, and the adventures of Buz and Tod on the CBS television show Route 66, a new generation took to the open road. Those who savor the journey as much as the destination still seek it out on Route 66 today.
Download or read book A People s Guide to Orange County written by Elaine Lewinnek and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-01-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "At first encounter, Orange County can resemble the incoherent sprawl that geographer James Howard Kunstler named The Geography of Nowhere: a car-dependent, seemingly bland space designed most of all for efficient capitalist consumption. But it is somewhere, too, and learning its stories helps it become more than its boosters' slogans. Writers Lisa Alvarez and Andrew Tonkovich, residents of Orange County's remote Modjeska Canyon, describe this whole county as "a much-constructed and -contrived locale, a pestered and paved landscape built and borne upon stories of human development... of destruction as well as, happily, of enduring wild places." In a similar vein, essayist D. J. Waldie, chronicler of the bordering suburb of Lakewood, asserts that "becoming Californian ... means locating yourself" in "habitats of memory" that connect ordinary, local areas with broader themes. Moving beyond sentimentality, nostalgia, and so many sales pitches that omit far too much, Waldie echoes Michel de Certeau's call to "awaken the stories that sleep in the streets." That is the goal of this book. Inspired by Laura Pulido, Laura Barraclough, and Wendy Cheng's A People's Guide to Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2012), as well as the People's Guides to Boston and San Francisco that have followed it, we offer this guidebook for locals, tourists, students, and everyone who wants to understand where they really are. This book is organized with regional chapters, sorted roughly north to south by community. Within each city, sites are listed alphabetically. After the group of entries for each city, we recommend nearby restaurants as well as other sites of interest for visitors. Readers may explore this book geographically or use the thematic tours in the appendix to consider environmental politics, Cold War legacies, the politics of housing, LGBTQ spaces, or Orange County's carceral state. The appendix also contains suggestions for teachers using this book, engaging students in cognitive mapping, close reading, popular-culture analysis, and creating additional entries of people's history. While many local histories tend to focus on a few white settlers, this book places attention on the people, especially the subaltern ones who are hierarchically under others, including workers, people of color, youth, and LGBTQ individuals. No single book can represent an entire county, so we have chosen to concentrate on the lesser-known power struggles that have happened here and influenced the landscape that we all share. We could not include everyone, of course. We are mindful that other groups are currently creating more people's history on this landscape that we hope our readers will continue to explore. In Orange County, excavating the diverse past can be frowned upon or actively repressed by those invested in selling Orange County in the style of its booster Anglo settlers from 150 years ago. This book tells the diverse political history beyond the bucolic imagery of orange-crate labels. We hope it will inspire readers to further explore Orange County and reflect on even more sites that could be included in the ordinary, extraordinary landscape here"--
Download or read book Coast of Dreams written by Kevin Starr and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-06-22 with total page 802 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this extraordinary book, Kevin Starr–widely acknowledged as the premier historian of California, the scope of whose scholarship the Atlantic Monthly has called “breathtaking”–probes the possible collapse of the California dream in the years 1990—2003. In a series of compelling chapters, Coast of Dreams moves through a variety of topics that show the California of the last decade, when the state was sometimes stumbling, sometimes humbled, but, more often, flourishing with its usual panache. From gang violence in Los Angeles to the spectacular rise–and equally spectacular fall–of Silicon Valley, from the Northridge earthquake to the recall of Governor Gray Davis, Starr ranges over myriad facts, anecdotes, news stories, personal impressions, and analyses to explore a time of unprecedented upheaval in California. Coast of Dreams describes an exceptional diversity of people, cultures, and values; an economy that mirrors the economic state of the nation; a battlefield where industry and the necessities of infrastructure collide with the inherent demands of a unique and stunning natural environment. It explores California politics (including Arnold Schwarzenegger’s election in the 2003 recall), the multifaceted business landscape, and controversial icons such as O. J. Simpson. “Historians of the future,” Starr writes, “will be able to see with more certainty whether or not the period 1990-2003 was not only the end of one California but the beginning of another”; in the meantime, he gives a picture of the place and time in a book at once sweeping and riveting in its details, deeply informed, engagingly personal, and altogether fascinating.
Download or read book Orange County written by Gustavo Arellano and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-09-16 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling author of ¡Ask a Mexican! Gustavo Arellano returns with Orange County, a seamlessly woven history of California's Orange County with Gustavo's personal narrative of growing up within its neighborhoods. The story began in 1918, when Gustavo Arellano's great-grandfather and grandfather arrived in the United States, only to be met with flying potatoes. They ran, and hid, and then went to work in Orange County's citrus groves, where, eventually, thousands of fellow Mexican villagers joined them. Gustavo was born sixty years later, the son of a tomato canner who dropped out of school in the ninth grade and an illegal immigrant who snuck into this country in the trunk of a Chevy. Meanwhile, Orange County changed radically, from a bucolic paradise of orange groves to the land where good Republicans go to die, American Christianity blossoms, and way too many bad television shows are green-lit. Part personal narrative, part cultural history, Orange County is the outrageous and true story of the man behind the wildly popular and controversial column ¡Ask a Mexican! and the locale that spawned him. It is a tale of growing up in an immigrant enclave in a crime-ridden neighborhood, but also in a promised land, a place that has nourished America's soul and Gustavo's family, both in this country and back in Mexico, for a century. Nationally bestselling author, syndicated columnist, and the spiciest voice of the Mexican-American community, Gustavo Arellano delivers the hilarious and poignant follow-up to ¡Ask a Mexican!, his critically acclaimed debut. Orange County not only weaves Gustavo's family story with the history of Orange County and the modern Mexican-immigrant experience but also offers sharp, caliente insights into a wide range of political, cultural, and social issues.
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 Everything Now written by Rosecrans Baldwin and published by MCD. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER. NAMED A BEST CALIFORNIA BOOKS OF 2021 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES A provocative, exhilaratingly new understanding of the United States’ most confounding metropolis—not just a great city, but a full-blown modern city-state America is obsessed with Los Angeles. And America has been thinking about Los Angeles all wrong, for decades, on repeat. Los Angeles is not just the place where the American dream hits the Pacific. (It has its own dreams.) Not just the vanishing point of America’s western drive. (It has its own compass.) Functionally, aesthetically, mythologically, even technologically, an independent territory, defined less by distinct borders than by an aura of autonomy and a sense of unfurling destiny—this is the city-state of Los Angeles. Deeply reported and researched, provocatively argued, and eloquently written, Rosecrans Baldwin's Everything Now approaches the metropolis from unexpected angles, nimbly interleaving his own voice with a chorus of others, from canonical L.A. literature to everyday citizens. Here, Octavia E. Butler and Joan Didion are in conversation with activists and astronauts, vampires and veterans. Baldwin records the stories of countless Angelenos, discovering people both upended and reborn: by disasters natural and economic, following gospels of wealth or self-help or personal destiny. The result is a story of a kaleidoscopic, vibrant nation unto itself—vastly more than its many, many parts. Baldwin’s concept of the city-state allows us, finally, to grasp a place—Los Angeles—whose idiosyncrasies both magnify those of America, and are so fully its own. Here, space and time don’t quite work the same as they do elsewhere, and contradictions are as stark as southern California’s natural environment. Perhaps no better place exists to watch the United States’s past, and its possible futures, play themselves out. Welcome to Los Angeles, the Great American City-State.
Download or read book Dream Baby Dream written by and published by . This book was released on 2019-10 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first monograph on Jimmy Marble showcases his fresh, colorful, and playful photography in a covetable book form.
Download or read book Backcountry Ghosts written by Josh Sides and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-04 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: California is an infamously tough place to be poor: home to about half of the entire nation's homeless population, burdened by staggering home prices and unsustainable rental rates, California is a state in crisis. But it wasn't always that way, as prize-winning historian Josh Sides reveals in Backcountry Ghosts. In 1862 President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, the most ambitious and sweeping social policy in the history of the United States. In the Golden State more than a hundred thousand people filed homesteading claims between 1863 and the late 1930s. More than sixty thousand Californians succeeded, claiming about ten million acres. In Backcountry Ghosts Josh Sides tells the histories of these Californian homesteaders, their toil and enormous patience, successes and failures, doggedness in the face of natural elements and disasters, and resolve to defend hard-earned land for themselves and their children. While some of these homesteaders were fulfilling the American Dream--that all Americans should have the opportunity to own land regardless of their background or station--others used the Homestead Act to add to already vast landholdings or control water or mineral rights. Sides recovers the fascinating stories of individual homesteaders in California, both those who succeeded and those who did not, and the ways they shaped the future of California and the American West. Backcountry Ghosts reveals the dangers of American dreaming in a state still reeling from the ambitions that led to the Great Recession.
Download or read book The Barbarian Nurseries written by Héctor Tobar and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-09-27 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 A Boston Globe Best Fiction Book of 2011 The great panoramic social novel that Los Angeles deserves—a twenty-first century, West Coast Bonfire of the Vanities by the only writer qualified to capture the city in all its glory and complexity With The Barbarian Nurseries, Héctor Tobar gives our most misunderstood metropolis its great contemporary novel, taking us beyond the glimmer of Hollywood and deeper than camera-ready crime stories to reveal Southern California life as it really is, across its vast, sunshiny sprawl of classes, languages, dreams, and ambitions. Araceli is the live-in maid in the Torres-Thompson household—one of three Mexican employees in a Spanish-style house with lovely views of the Pacific. She has been responsible strictly for the cooking and cleaning, but the recession has hit, and suddenly Araceli is the last Mexican standing—unless you count Scott Torres, though you'd never suspect he was half Mexican but for his last name and an old family photo with central L.A. in the background. The financial pressure is causing the kind of fights that even Araceli knows the children shouldn't hear, and then one morning, after a particularly dramatic fight, Araceli wakes to an empty house—except for the two Torres-Thompson boys, little aliens she's never had to interact with before. Their parents are unreachable, and the only family member she knows of is Señor Torres, the subject of that old family photo. So she does the only thing she can think of and heads to the bus stop to seek out their grandfather. It will be an adventure, she tells the boys. If she only knew . . . With a precise eye for the telling detail and an unerring way with character, soaring brilliantly and seamlessly among a panorama of viewpoints, Tobar calls on all of his experience—as a novelist, a father, a journalist, a son of Guatemalan immigrants, and a native Angeleno—to deliver a novel as broad, as essential, as alive as the city itself.
Download or read book Blood and Oranges written by James O. Goldsborough and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An action-packed historical novel whose charismatic characters take the reader from the roaring twenties to the fiery nineties in America's favorite left coast city. Los Angeles has never been better portrayed than by novelist James Oliver Goldsborough in Blood and Oranges. Blood and Oranges: The Story of Los Angeles tells the story of how Los Angeles got that way— you know, THAT way, with Hollywood, mega-churches, impossible traffic, oil wells on the beaches, murders in the foothills, and riots in the suburbs. You have to go back a ways to understand, back to when the water came. Twin brothers Willie and Eddie Mull, a preacher and a high roller, arrive with the water and set out to make their marks. They rise with the city and reach the top. The brothers have much to answer for, especially to their children. Maggie and Lizzie, Eddie’s daughters, don’t like Eddie’s mob ties, oil wells, or his gambling ship in Santa Monica Bay. Cal Mull, Willie’s son, watches his father rise to become the nation’s top evangelistic preacher, but like his idol, St. Augustine, Willie is weak in the flesh. Maggie, an aviator, wants women to fly in the war, but must get past Howard Hughes and find help in Washington. Lizzie works for the LA Times, wants women to be able to write for more than just the society pages in the paper, and does her best to get crime out of the D.A.’s department. (And what happened to the trolleys that once covered 1,100 miles of city streets, half the distance to Chicago?) The second generation of the family reacts to the first, but then must face the revolt of its own children. In Blood and Oranges, we follow and fall in love with the City of Angels as it transforms itself over three generations, rolling with the waves that lap its Pacific shores, a place of plazas and orange groves becoming something unrecognizable to those who knew it even a half century earlier. It is the story of a family with its fingers in the seminal events of a city’s history—the rise and fall of institutions, neighborhoods, citizens, of the very land itself, constantly threatened by the people who call themselves its stewards.
