Kevin Starr

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Kevin Starr (born 3 September 1940 in San Francisco) is an American historian, best-known for his multi-volume series on the history of California, collectively called "America and the California Dream". Starr is currently University Professor and Professor of History at the University of Southern California, but has been a professor or visiting lecturer at numerous California universities, including UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Riverside, Santa Clara University, the University of San Francisco, and Stanford University. Starr served as California State Librarian from 1994 to 2004, after which Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger named him State Librarian Emeritus. In November 2006 he was awarded a National Humanities Medal.

Starr received his B.A. from the University of San Francisco in 1962 and a doctorate from Harvard University in 1969 in American Literature, spending two years between the institutions serving in the U.S. Army as a lieutenant in the 68th Armored Brigade in then-West Germany.

In 2004 he published the Coast of Dreams. It is a concise cultural history of California since 1990. As a longtime citizen of California, Starr sees the state as both a site of human wonder, enjoyment and fulfillment of dreams but also as a place of great conflict, emphasises by the Race riots of the 1990s.

[edit] Books

Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915. (1973) ISBN 0195016440
Land's End (a novel) (1979) ISBN 0070608806
Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (1985) ISBN 0195034899
Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (1990) ISBN 0195044878
Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (1996) ISBN 0195100808
The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s (1997) ISBN 0195100794
Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940-1950 (2002) ISBN 0195124375
Coast Of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990-2002 (2004) ISBN 0679412883
California: A History (2005) ISBN 0679642404