Quotes from Kevin Starr

The Irish didn't read and write for a couple of thousand years, and I think we developed good memories and recall. We have a sense of the revelatory detail. I look for them.

I don't reverberate to victimhood, probably because of my own life. I refused to become a victim myself, so it's not one of my big stories.

In our public life, California is on the verge of being a failed state, and no state has failed in the history of this country.

Wilde stepped off the train in Oakland wearing a Spanish sombrero, a velvet suit, a puce cravat, yellow gloves, and buckled shoes, and wended his way across the bay to the Bohemian Club, where he is reported to have drunk his hosts under the table.

And that question is, is San Francisco just a boutique city? A theme park? Or do creative forces still coalesce there?

What kind of world would this postrailroad era be for California, now that it was less than a week's journey from the East Coast?

What would they find? A better life? Or the same dreary, grinding poverty that had motivated their immigration in the first place?

There has always been something slightly bipolar about California. It was either utopia or dystopia, a dream or a nightmare, a hope or a broken promise— and too infrequently anything in between.

The world was still rushing in—legally and illegally, as it turned out—not to escape reality in California, to bask in the unearned increment, but to struggle competitively in a society that had only recently begun to internalize in its myth of itself what the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno called the tragic sense of life.

California, Royce noted, was a promise, but it was also a struggle for redemption in the face of failure.

These trees (Sequoia sempervirens) and their first cousins (Sequoiandendron giganteum), flourishing in some thirty-five groves in the Sierra foothills, were the most ancient living entities on the planet, some of them four thousand years old.

Native Americans considered the grizzly another kind of human being, a creature from the mythic past, a survivor from the dawn of creation.

Disneyland is a text through which we can look back and reexperience the hopes and fears, the beliefs and illusions, of a postwar generation in the throes of creating the place we know as suburban Southern California.

But the real impetus behind dividing California came from the fact that the state was truly two, and perhaps even four, distinct places: the urbanizing Bay Area and the mining districts; the Far North (one breakaway effort had called for the creation of the state of Shasta in that region); the Central Valley; and a sparsely settled Southern California, significantly Mexican, where ranch life and agriculture predominated.

From the beginning, American California was caught in a paradox of reverent awe and exploitative use.

By 1870, San Francisco, with a population of 149,473, was the tenth largest city in the United States, a remarkable development for a city that did not formally exist in 1846.

Such a hope, such a psychology of expectation, fused the California experience irretrievably onto a dream of better days: of a sudden, almost magical, transformation of the ordinary. Ironically, such an expectation was also reprising the dreams of the Spanish conquistadores, explorers, and maritime adventurers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Spanish quest for El Dorado was now being Americanized with its psychological and mythic hold as powerful as ever.

Theirs was, rather, a more narrowly focused life, anchored in and structured by Franciscan piety and the immediate challenges of missionary life. Some of these missionaries were, by the standards of any age, admirable men. Others were narrow-minded, even bigoted, regarding Native Americans as little more than children. All of them were leading lonely, isolated lives in a frequently forgotten place.

Had the mission system proved successful—and by the 1830s it had had more than sixty years to do so—a steady stream of Hispanicized Native Americans should long since have been transferring into the civil population of California. This never happened. Either the Indians died off, or they became permanently missionized (which is to say, wards of the Franciscans), or they fled into the interior. Mission culture remained volatile

The gold of California was not under private ownership. It belonged to everyone, provided one could find it, lay legal claim to it, extract it, and get it safely to one or the other of the many assay centers that were now springing up where nuggets could be weighed, valued, and melted into ingots for shipment to San Francisco and New York.

All told, some $594 million in ingots—the equivalent of $10 billion in 2001 dollars—would over the course of the next decade be leaving the goldfields of California for the eastern United States.

Incorporated in June 1861, the Central Pacific Railroad of California was the result of conversations that had begun a year and a half earlier between Judah and four Sacramento businessmen: Collis P. Huntington and his partner Mark Hopkins (hardware), Leland Stanford (groceries), and Charles Crocker (dry goods).

the murder rate in the mines was horrendous—an annual rate of 506.6 homicides per 100,000 population in Sonora, for example, in 1850–51, which is fifty times the national homicide rate of 1999.

Raising a mere $15,800 in cash, the Big Four, as history would know them, formed an enterprise that over the next decades would earn them $200 million in profits.