A New California Dream

California doesn t need more lofty rhetoric about what a Dream place this state is. Our government is in crisis. The impartial Legislative Analysts Office projects multi-billion dollar deficits until at least 2015. Cynics say that Californians are too polarized, too diverse, and too burdened with a byzantine bureaucracy to come together to face this mountain. Yet our recurring deficit is only less than one percent of California s nearly two trillion dollar economy. And these cynics don t offer reasons so much as excuses. California today has a proud history, a stunning natural environment, and an unbelievably creative people that connects to every corner of the globe. Reflecting on the fractures that have flowed from the hyperidealistic California Dream of the past, Patrick Atwater shows how together we can harness those strengths to build a New California Dream focused on creating a better life for all Californians. In honor of his parents, twenty percent of the proceeds from the book will be donated to California schools through DonorsChoose.

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.

In the last one hundred years, imported water has transformed the environment of the Golden State and its quality of life, with land ownership patterns and real estate boosterism dramatically altering both urban and rural communities. The key to this transformation has been expanded access to water from the Eastern Sierra, the Colorado River, and Northern California rivers. "Whoever brings the water, brings the people," wrote engineer William Mulholland, under whose leadership the process of growth through irrigation began. Now, using first–person voices of Californians to reveal the resulting changes, author David Carle concludes that it may be time to stop drowning the California dream of the good life with imported water. Using oral histories, contemporary newspaper articles, and autobiographies, Carle explores the historic changes in California, showing how imported water has shaped the pattern of population growth in the state. Because water choices remain the primary tool for shaping California's future, Carle also argues that it is possible to improve both the state's damaged environment and the quality of life if Californians will step out of this historic pattern and embrace limited water supplies as a fact of life in this naturally dry region.

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.

Series statement from author's Material dreams. Bibliography: p. 460-479.

With its archetypal open plan and reverence of indoor-outdoor living, the Ranch house is at the very heart of the California dream. When we picture California Ranch houses—the low-slung, informal dwellings that engulfed suburbs after World War II—we are thinking of just one part of a phenomenon that has its roots in early-nineteenth-century ranchos, and which continues today in houses that are startling and up-to-the-minute. Examples of the type have been called ranchos, ranchers, and California ramblers. They have been styled Spanish, Japanese, and French; Monterey and International; Vernacular, Minimalist, and Modernist. From the 1797 Rancho Los Alamitos of Long Beach to such contemporary homes as the Miller Residence of Corte Madera, Ranch Houses unveils the great variety and the very finest examples of this multifaceted form. Including the work of such architectural luminaries as Cliff May, Richard Neutra, John Lautner, and Charles Moore, Ranch Houses is an essential resource for architects, home owners, and all those who aspire to the indoor/outdoor lifestyle that is the California Dream.

California matters, both as a place and as an idea. What famed historian Kevin Starr has called “the California Dream” is a vital part of American self-understanding. Just as America was meant to be a place of renewal, even redemption, for Europe, so too California was intended as a place of renewal for America. Therefore, California—place and idea—provides a fertile ground for scholars to think deeply about what it means to articulate “the promise of American life.” This book follows in the train of George Marsden’s classic The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship—believing that people of faith have a contribution to make to scholarship—and of Jay Green’s more recent book, Christian Historiography: Five Rival Views—believing that scholars of faith should engage in moral inquiry. In this book, eight authors inquire into the moral questions that emerge from studying California.

California Dreams and American Contradictions establishes a genealogy of western American women writers publishing between 1870 and 1965 to argue that both white women and women of color regionalized dominant national literary trends to negotiate the contradictions between an American liberal individualism and American equality. Monique McDade analyzes works by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Helen Hunt Jackson, Sui Sin Far, and a previously unstudied African American writer, Eva Rutland, to trace an archive of western American women writers who made visible what dominant genres subsumed under images of American progress and westward expansion. Read together these writers provide new entry points into the political debates that have plagued the United States since the nation's founding and that set the precedent for westward expansion. Their romances, regional sketches, memoirs, and journalism point to the inherently antagonistic relationship between a Rooseveltian rugged individualism that encouraged an Anglo male-dominated West and the progressive equality and opportunity the West seemingly promised disenfranchised citizens. The writers included in California Dreams and American Contradictions challenged literature's role in creating regional division, conformist communities that support nationally sponsored images of gendered, ethnic, and immigrant others, and liberal histories validated through a strategic vocabulary rooted in "freedom," "equality," and "progress."