I once watched Kevin Starr address a gathering of civic leaders in Modesto. Pity the journalist who parachutes in from New York or London with an assignment to “profile” California. But with Kevin Starr, a generation of Californians had a historian eager to fly into that storm, again and again. Keep at it, was his theme; the California story is too wonderful, and too important, to walk away from. It was titled, simply, “California.”California, Starr wrote, “had long since become one of the prisms through which the American people, for better and for worse, could glimpse their future.

Source: Los Angeles Times January 16, 2017 20:30 UTC