STARR:ENDANGERED DREAMS ACD P: The Great Depression in California (Americans California Dream Series) - Softcover

Starr, Kevin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195118022 ISBN 13: 9780195118025

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA, 1997

Synopsis

In Endangered Dreams, Kevin Starr paints a portrait of California during the Great Depression that is both detailed and panoramic, offering a vivid look at the personalities and events that shaped a decade of explosive tension. Out of a shattered decade of economic and social dislocation, he constructs a coherent whole and a mirror for understanding our own time.

About this title

Review:

Endangered Dreams will be valuable for teachers and advanced students for the wealth of detail Starr provides and for the pleasure of his ability to tell a compelling story (American Studies Today)

Starr describes the radicals brilliantly ... His description of the 1934 San Francisco maritime strike is one of the best ever written (American Studies Today)

From the Back Cover:

In Endangered Dreams, Starr begins with the rise of radicalism on the Pacific Coast, which erupted when the Great Depression swept over California in the 1930s. Starr captures the triumphs and tumult of the great agricultural strikes in the Imperial Valley, the San Joaquin Valley, Stockton, and Salinas, identifying the crucial role played by Communist organizers; he also shows how, after some successes, the Communists disbanded their unions on direct orders of the Comintern in 1935. The highpoint of social conflict, however, was 1934, the year of the coastwide maritime strike, and here Starr's narrative talents are at their best as he brings to life the astonishing general strike that took control of San Francisco, where workers led by charismatic longshoreman Harry Bridges mounted the barricades to stand off National Guardsmen. That same year socialist Upton Sinclair won the Democratic nomination for governor, and he launched his dramatic End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign. In the end, however, these challenges galvanized the Right in a corporate, legal, and vigilante counterattack that crushed both organized labor and Sinclair. And yet, the Depression also brought out the finest in Californians: state Democrats fought for a local New Deal; California natives helped care for more than a million impoverished migrants through public and private programs; artists movingly documented the impact of the Depression; and an unprecedented program of public works (capped by the Golden Gate Bridge) made the California we know today possible.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0195118022
• ISBN 13: 9780195118025
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 430