On the heels of the 50th anniversary of Kevin Starr’s monumental, Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 (1973), and also with AHA being housed in the City of San Francisco, which raised Starr to become California’s unofficial state historian, this session brings together five contributors to the recent volume, Redemptive Dreams: Engaging Kevin Starr’s California (Routledge 2023), along with three other leading voices in California history to reflect on the significance of this first book-length treatment of Kevin Starr’s vision of California.

The eight essays in this volume—including one by Starr on the future of California historiography, and one by the late Mike Davis reflecting on the past and future of Starr’s California, and also on this volume’s chapters—aim to capture particular themes situated in Starr’s work. Casting themes from Starr’s work in light of the current shape of the scholarship in the interdisciplinary fields represented by the book’s scholars (History, Sociology, and Theology) carries relevance both for California historiography and also for California’s current situation. Each chapter advances toward a singular investigation around a key theme, which is highly fitting for Starr’s polymathic interdisciplinary style, helping illumine not only what Starr does within the field of California history, but also the larger question of what manner of inquiry is most fitting for studying not only Kevin Starr, but also California, in critical perspectives.

The volume goes beyond historical inquiry, representing a kind of Critical Socio-Historical Studies, representing insights from the Critical Study of Religion, Sociology, and Urban Studies, although fitting also into the social-scientific discipline of American Studies by virtue of Starr’s locatedness and training in the American Literature. While not always comfortably situated within a more critical school of historiography, Starr contributed to helping countless people understand the internal drama of the cultural narrative that made California what it is today, along with its unique place in the world, and its ongoing problematic. As William Deverell has argued, no single author has produced such a definitive account of California than Kevin Starr. But this book is not an engagement with his account of California, but rather of Starr’s vision of the place, which happens to come from a Catholic historian, although not often enough acknowledged as such.

Some historians have suggested that after his untimely death in 2017 and the events of 2020 that we may now be beyond Kevin Starr in our understanding of California. But the different chapters of this book suggest otherwise, for the take on Starr’s complicated interpretation of the colonialist experiment (especially with the Catholic dimension) and his understanding of race, sin, and spirituality deserve a reckoning, from considerations in theology, particular historical moments, perspectives from Chicana/o studies, and California’s own landscapes, as well as critical voices from the land and from new developments in historical inquiry.