Californias Golden Years

Author : William T. Bagley
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book California's Golden Years written by William T. Bagley and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Politics is personal, Bill Bagley likes to say, and here is a personal journey through the politics of America's most extraordinary state. California's Golden Years offers tales of cash-filled envelopes, all-night poker games, and all the free liquor a legislator could drink. But the stories and the anecdotes offer more than mere fun -- they illuminate a larger lesson learned during Bagley's 14 years in the California Legislature. The personal relationships forged during a continuum of hosted bipartisan lunches and dinners are, in Bagley's view, the glue that ensures working relationships and pragmatic compromises. Those who play together, he writes, stay together. The Legislature of Bagley's era accomplished much for its state. With the population booming, California enjoyed the best schools, roads, and water systems in the nation. Today, as the Golden State faces unprecedented challenges, California's Golden Years offers both a look back toward a fondly remembered era, and an insider's explanation for why politics seemed to work better then than now.

Author : Kevin Starr
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199924309
Total Pages : 576 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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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 576 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.

Author : Joe Mathews
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520268520
Total Pages : 237 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book California Crackup written by Joe Mathews and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "California Crackup is brilliant. It cuts through the familiar tangle of diagnoses and quick-fix solutions to provide a comprehensive and persuasive analysis of California's dysfunctional governmental system. Paul and Mathews have coolly laid out a complicated story, made it readable, sometimes even comedic. It is the best discussion of the issue I've seen in over three decades."--Peter Schrag, author of California: America's High-Stakes Experiment "I know of no other work that combines so succinctly and enjoyably a historical summary of California's existing problems with such a sweeping and provocative program of reform."--Ethan Rarick, University of California, Berkeley "Mark Paul and Joe Mathews have produced an indispensable guide to California's crisis of governance--and they have done so with humor, scholarship, fairness and storytelling verve. Every Californian should read this book."--Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars "Mark Paul... has a talent for presenting California Big Think stuff in an easily accessible and always readable way...[offering] clear and creative insights on the subject of California's collapse."--CalBuzz "Joe Mathews has done an artful, fascinating, and convincing job of connecting the California of today's Schwarzenegger era to the long history that made his rise possible.--James Fallows,The Atlantic Monthly on Mathews' book, The People's Machine

Author : Gary Noy
Publisher : Heyday.ORIM
ISBN 13 : 1597145041
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hellacious California! written by Gary Noy and published by Heyday.ORIM. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Teems with bittersweet compounds of 19th-century nefariousness, including . . . gambling, knife fights, the demon drink, con artistry, and prostitution.” —Los Angeles Review of Books In 1855 an ex-miner lamented that nineteenth-century California “can and does furnish the best bad things,” including “purer liquors . . . finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier courtezans [sic]” than anywhere else in America. Lured by boons of gold and other exploitable resources, California’s settler population mushroomed under Mexican and early American control, and this period of rapid transformation gave rise to a freewheeling culture best epitomized by its entertainments. Hellacious California tours the rambunctious and occasionally appalling amusements of the Golden State: gambling, gun duels, knife fights, gracious dining and gluttony, prostitution, fandangos, cigars, con artistry, and the demon drink. Historian Gary Noy unearths myriad primary sources, many of which have never before been published, to spin his true tall tales that are by turns humorous and horrifying. Whether detailing the exploits of an inebriated stallion, gambling parlors as a reinforcement and subversion of racial norms, armed skirmishes over eggs, or the ins and outs of the “Spirit Lover” scam, Noy expertly situates these stories in the context of a live-for-the-moment society characterized by audacity, bigotry, and risk. “Confidently carries the reader into the everyday lives of early Californians. The focus on Californians’ popular pastimes . . . with an eye on vice, decadence, and scandal, makes this book a rowdy tour.” —Dr. Patrick Ettinger, Professor of History, California State University, Sacramento; Former Director of CSUS Public History Program and the Capital Campus Oral History Program

Author : Richard O. Cowan
Publisher : Bookcraft, Incorporated
ISBN 13 : 9781570082009
Total Pages : 452 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book California Saints written by Richard O. Cowan and published by Bookcraft, Incorporated. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : California Heritage Museum
Publisher : Schiffer Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9780764319433
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book California Tile written by California Heritage Museum and published by Schiffer Publishing. This book was released on 2004 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the first half of the 20th century, California tile makers produced richly patterned tiles for building facades, interiors, garden ornamentation, furniture, and serving pieces. Arranged alphabetically, over 850 color images this volume capture the beauty of hundreds of tiles from Hispano-Moresque, Kraftile, Helen Greenleaf Lane, L.A. Pressed Brick, Malibu, Markoff, Muresque, Pacific, Pomona, Poxon, Rhead, S & S, Taylor, Tropico, Tudor, Walrich, West Coast, Woolenius, and tile furnishings and crafts from Cellini-Craft, Hillside Pottery, and Monterey Furniture, with a companion volume covering companies from Acme to Handcraft. Both volumes are enriched by rarely seen archival photographs including historical site installations. A useful guide gives to tile terminology and techniques.

Author : David Helvarg
Publisher : New World Library
ISBN 13 : 1608684407
Total Pages : 370 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Golden Shore written by David Helvarg and published by New World Library. This book was released on 2016-09-02 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the first human settlements to the latest marine explorations, The Golden Shore tells the tale of the history, culture, and changing nature of California’s coasts and ocean. David Helvarg takes the reader on both a geographic and literary journey along the state’s 1,100-mile Pacific coastline, from the Oregon border to the San Diego–Tijuana international border fence and out into its whale-, seal-, and shark-rich offshore seamounts, rock isles, and kelp forests. Part history, part travelogue, part love letter, The Golden Shore captures the spirit of the California coast and its mythic place in American culture.

Author : Nick Neely
Publisher : Catapult
ISBN 13 : 164009444X
Total Pages : 433 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Alta California written by Nick Neely and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This national bestseller chronicles one man’s 650–mile trek on foot from San Diego to San Francisco—sure to appeal to readers of naturalist works like Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, Paul Thoreau’s On the Plain of Snakes, and Mark Kenyon’s That Wild Country. In 1769, an expedition led by Gaspar de Portolá sketched a route that would become, in part, the famous El Camino Real. It laid the foundation for the Golden State we know today, a place that remains as mythical and captivating as any in the world. Despite having grown up in California, Nick Neely realized how little he knew about its history. So he set off to learn it bodily, with just a backpack and a tent, trekking through stretches of California both lonely and urban. For twelve weeks, following the journal of expedition missionary Father Juan Crespí, Neely kept pace with the ghosts of the Portolá expedition—nearly 250 years later. Weaving natural and human history, Alta California relives Neely’s adventure, while telling a story of Native cultures and the Spanish missions that soon devastated them, and exploring the evolution of California and its landscape. The result is a collage of historical and contemporary California, of lyricism and pedestrian serendipity, and of the biggest issues facing California today—water, agriculture, oil and gas, immigration, and development—all of it one step at a time. “Rich in little–known history . . . Up the Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo county coasts, then inland into the Salinas Valley to Monterey Bay. Somewhere along here, the owl moons and woodpeckers do something you might not have thought possible in 2019: they make you fall, or refall, in love with California, ungrudgingly, wildfires and insane housing prices and all . . . What a journey, you think. What a state." —San Francisco Chronicle

Author : Jack Cashill
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1416531033
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book What's the Matter with California? written by Jack Cashill and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-08-12 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A whimsical response to the best-selling What's the Matter with Kansas? casts a skeptical eye on the nation's most liberal and populous state, in an anecdotal survey that likens California to an American Rome of over-indulgence and over-regulation that fails to meet its ideals.

Author : Larry N. Gerston
Publisher : CRC Press
ISBN 13 : 1466559241
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Not So Golden After All written by Larry N. Gerston and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quality public education, modern highway systems, and reasonably priced housing—these are just some of the qualities that once made California one of the most desirable places to live. Just a few decades later, the state finds itself with an education system that is failing its citizens, one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation, and a quickly evaporating dream of home ownership. Illustrating each step of the breakdown that led to its current state of dysfunction, Not So Golden After All: The Rise and Fall of California provides insight into a system gone amuck. It addresses complicated topics in an engaging manner to help the public and leaders alike understand how to make policies that balance expectations with outcomes. Key political themes covered include disconnected institutions, perpetually unbalanced budgets, immigration, voter ignorance, interest group influence, and dysfunctional institutions. Investigating the gridlock that has become all too common within the state’s legislature, the book: Demonstrates the impact of the state’s inability to generate sufficient revenue, particularly for public education and an under-trained workforce Highlights the problems created by poor land use planning —from suburban sprawl and government waste to inefficient use of agricultural land Examines how interest groups have been able to wrest control of the processes that were created to keep them in line Identifies the duplication of efforts and other inefficiencies at the state and local levels Author Larry Gerston leaves no stone unturned in his discussion of California's economy, position on the Pacific Rim, cultural diversity, land and water issues, and its relationship with the federal government. He examines the state’s infrastructure, natural resources, immigration issues, education, finance, healthcare, civil rights, planning and development, security, laws, political parties, and power structures to provide civic leaders and policy makers with the understanding required to restore the sheen to this once glistening paradise. The Contra Costa Times discussed Larry Gerston's recent Commonwealth Club lecture in a May 17, 2012 article. Read an interview with Larry Gerston in The Mercury News.