Under the Warm California Sun: Youth Culture in the Postwar Decades

California was a place where many postwar suburban dreams came true, and offered a selective peek into America's rosy future. Postwar social and technological changes, the advent of television, and the takeover of mass media by the youth market made popular culture more ubiquitous than ever before. The emergence of a specifically marketed youth culture meant that baby boomers around the nation shared collective experiences more than any other previous generation. In the mid-1960s, challenges surfaced as the rougher edges of California's youth culture, those groups left out of the mass-mediated picture, began to show. The fragmentation of popular culture and the multiplicity of entertainment options enjoyed by the increasingly segmented masses mark the present popular culture as very different from the past. The Golden State remains both the geographical and psychological center of pop culture production geared towards youth, enjoying a unique place in the American dreamscape.