\u201cStarr was an old-school historian, who came up before Chicano Studies,\u201d Arellano said. \u201cHe was smart enough to know he had to tell those stories too.\u201d Arellano has been reading Starr\u2019s work since he was a college student, and continues to rely on it as a reference for his journalism, including his regular pieces on OC’s racist and right-wing roots.<\/span><\/p>\n One of the puzzles of Starr’s long and productive career was his inability to write a book on the period of his adult life — the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s — which were fascinating and important years for California.<\/p>\n \u201cI wish I knew the answer,\u201d historian William Deverell of USC and the Huntington says of the three-decade gap. \u201cThat period demands a kind of Kevin Starr capaciousness. We will miss that book \u2014 it may have been too personal.\u201d Indeed, Starr told my wife, when she interviewed him on his imperfect ’90s volume, Coast of Dreams<\/em>, that he had trouble making sense of that era, especially its darker themes, no matter how hard he tried.<\/span><\/p>\n Starr was born in 1940, but there was something old-school about him from the start. Says Deverell: \u201cKevin was the kind of guy who, when he got a cane, everyone was like, ‘Yes \u2014 he\u2019s someone who should have a cane.’ \u201d<\/span><\/p>\n One thing sometimes overlooked about Starr, in part because of his Ivy League style and his affinities with the era of his grandparents, is that he was a great lover of music, from collegiate fight songs to rock n roll. <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe early \u201860s Beach Boys were bringing California to the world,\u201d Deverell says of one of Starr\u2019s favorite groups. \u201cKevin did that too.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n The list of historians who\u2019ve really shifted the way we see a region or era is not terribly long. W.E.B. DuBois remade our understanding of Reconstruction, racism and capitalism in the first decade of the 20th century, C. Vann Woodward destroyed Southern nostalgia in a series of essays on the burden of the region\u2019s history, Gordon Wood revealed the radicalism of an American revolution known popularly through three-cornered hats, and Eric Hobsbawn reframed \u201cthe long 19th century\u201d around class conflict and imperialism.<\/span><\/p>\n
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<\/a>Was Starr able to do the same for California?<\/p>\n