I've always tried to write California history as American history. The paradox is that New England history is by definition national history, Mid-Atlantic history is national history. We're still suffering from that.
Kevin StarrI always thought the women of my age group got short shrift because the women's liberation movement came slightly after. You look at the yearbooks and you see the future homemakers of America - hurray for that - but you also see them in the engineers club. You see minority kids as student body presidents at a time when everyone was supposed to be terminally racist. Yearbooks are genres; they're also folk art, folk documentation.
Kevin StarrI like narrative, and I ultimately am in love with the men and women I write about, most of them.
Kevin StarrIn the luxuriance of a bowl of grapes set out in ritual display, in a bottle of wine, the soil and sunshine of California reached millions for whom that distant place would henceforth be envisioned as a sun-graced land resplendent with the goodness of the fruitful earth.
Kevin Starr