Michelle Phillips evokes the heady atmosphere of creativity and meteoric success, and the destructive, drug-filled lifestyle that characterized the West Coast music scene in the sixties

California Dreamin' from Pénélope Bagieu depicts Mama Cass as you've never known her, in this poignant graphic novel about the remarkable vocalist who rocketed The Mamas & the Papas to stardom. Before she was the legendary Mama Cass of the folk group The Mamas and the Papas, Ellen Cohen was a teen girl from Baltimore with an incredible voice, incredible confidence, and incredible dreams. She dreamed of being not just a singer but a star. Not just a star—a superstar. So, at the age of nineteen, at the dawn of the sixties, Ellen left her hometown and became Cass Elliot. At her size, Cass was never going to be the kind of girl that record producers wanted on album covers. But she found an unlikely group of co-conspirators, and in their short time together this bizarre and dysfunctional band recorded some of the most memorable songs of their era. Through the whirlwind of drugs, war, love, and music, Cass struggled to keep sight of her dreams, of who she loved, and—most importantly—who she was.

The California Dream made Route 66 the most famous road in the world. Flappers dreamed of stardom under the bright lights of Hollywood. A wave of families fleeing the Dust Bowl transformed the state during the Great Depression. During World War II, another wave followed Route 66 seeking opportunity in the massive wartime industrial plants. Thousands of soldiers trained in the Mojave Desert and then returned amid the postwar prosperity to blossoming housing developments that replaced the vast orange groves. While Nat King Cole sang "(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66," the newly prosperous middle class hit the road headed for the dream land constructed by Walt Disney. Inspired by the Beat poets, the hippies, and the adventures of Buz and Tod on the CBS television show Route 66, a new generation took to the open road. Those who savor the journey as much as the destination still seek it out on Route 66 today.

2020 Miriam Matthews Ethnic History Award from the Los Angeles City Historical Society Alison Rose Jefferson examines how African Americans pioneered America’s “frontier of leisure” by creating communities and business projects in conjunction with their growing population in Southern California during the nation’s Jim Crow era.

Everyone thinks Dean Collins is too old for Fallon Blackwood. Her parents, her friends, even Dean himself. In fact, he wants her to date guys her own age. But Fallon doesn't care about that. All she cares about is that she can't take her eyes off Dean, her neighbor, her best friend, the guy who taught her to ride a bike and to climb trees. And sometimes Dean can't take his eyes off her, either. And sometimes he looks at her like he wants to kiss her. So it doesn't matter that he's thirty-two and she's eighteen. All that matters is that they belong with each other, and she needs to convince him of that. Good thing they're taking a cross-country road trip together, right? California to New York; three thousand miles and a love story in the making... NOTE: A STANDALONE set in the world of Heartstone.

In Material Dreams, Starr turns to one of the most vibrant decades in the Golden State's history, the 1920s, when some two million Americans migrated to California, the vast majority settling in or around Los Angeles. Although he treats readers to intriguing side trips to Santa Barbara and Pasadena, Starr focuses here mainly on Los Angeles, revealing how this major city arose almost defiantly on a site lacking many of the advantages required for urban development, creating itself out of sheer will, the Great Gatsby of American cities. He describes how William Ellsworth Smyth, the Peter the Hermit of the Irrigation Crusade, propounded the importance of water in Southern California's future, and how such figures as the self-educated, Irish engineer William Mulholland (who built the main aquaducts to Los Angeles) and George Chaffey (who diverted the Colorado River, transforming desert into the lush Imperial Valley) brought life-supporting water to the arid South. He examines the discovery of oil ("Yes it's oil, oil, oil / that makes LA boil," went the official drinking song of the Uplifters Club), the boosters and land developers, the evangelists (such as Bob Shuler, the Methodist Savanarola of Los Angeles, and Aimee Semple McPherson), and countless other colorful figures of the period. There are also fascinating sections on the city's architecture (such as the remarkably innovative Bradbury Building and its eccentric, neophyte designer, George Wyman), the impact of the automobile on city planning, the great antiquarian book collections, the Hollywood film community, and much more. By the end of the decade, Los Angeles had tripled in population and become the fifth largest city in the nation. In Material Dreams, Kevin Starr captures this explosive growth in a narrative tour de force that combines wide-ranging scholarship with captivating prose.

This volume deals with the years of World War II and after. In the 1940s California changed from a regional centre into the dominant economic, social and cultural force it has been in America ever since.

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.

Examining California's formative years, this innovative study seeks to discover the origins of the California dream and the social, psychological, and symbolic impact it has had not only on Californians but also on the rest of the country.

An illustrated mid-career monograph exploring the 30-year creative journey of the 8-time Academy Award–nominated writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson has been described as "one of American film's modern masters" and "the foremost filmmaking talent of his generation." Anderson's ï¬?lms have received 25 Academy Award nominations, and he has worked closely with many of the most accomplished actors of our time, including Lesley Ann Manville, Julianne Moore, Daniel Day-Lewis, Joaquin Phoenix, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. In Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks, Anderson’s entire career—from Hard Eight (1996), Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), Punch Drunk Love (2002), There Will Be Blood (2007), The Master (2012), Inherent Vice (2014), and Phantom Thread (2017) to his music videos for Radiohead to his early short ï¬?lms—is examined in illustrated detail for the ï¬?rst time. Anderson’s influences, his style, and the recurring themes of alienation, reinvention, ambition, and destiny that course through his movies are analyzed and supplemented by ï¬?rsthand interviews with Anderson’s closest collaborators—including producer JoAnne Sellar, actor Vicky Krieps, and composer Jonny Greenwood—and illuminated by ï¬?lm stills, archival photos, original illustrations, and an appropriately psychedelic design aesthetic. Masterworks is a tribute to the dreamers, drifters, and evil dentists who populate his world.