California, Wallace Stegner wrote, is like the rest of the United States, only more so. Wherever the country is heading, California has been there first: mass media, car culture, the military-industrial complex, suburbs, computers, New Age spirituality, biotechnology. Perhaps the best proof of this hyper-Americanness is how little California seems to know or care about its history. What does the past matter, after all, when the future is being made before one’s eyes?

This amnesia makes Kevin Starr’s achievement all the more valuable. The leading historian of California, his monumental “Americans and the California Dream” series tells the story of the state on an unprecedented scale – six volumes so far, covering only the first 100 years from statehood in 1850. Now, Mr. Starr has boiled down his life’s work into a brisk, accessible single volume, “California: A History” (Modern Library, 400 pages, $24.95). Mr. Starr is an ideal teacher. He manages to touch on virtually every important name and date in California history, from its discovery in the 16th century to the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 21st. As a Los Angeles native who learned almost nothing about California’s history, in school anyway, I can only wish it had been available years ago.

Given the scope of the subject and the limits of space, “California” is not an analytical history. Yet Mr. Starr deftly weaves the major questions of California history into his chronological survey. All of these revolve around California’s promise, which is America’s promise raised to intoxicating new levels: freedom, prosperity, a new beginning for both individual lives and civilization itself. By the same token, however, the state’s more than occasional failures to keep that promise are felt especially keenly, accounting for the apocalyptic cast of the California imagination. If you can’t make it there, you can’t make it anywhere; there is no further frontier, no place left to go. That is why there is no more disillusioned American than a disillusioned Californian, as the work of Joan Didion and Mike Davis will attest.

Mr. Starr certainly does not belong among the debunkers of the California Dream. Writing as a kind of quasi-official historian (he served for a decade as the California state librarian), he is markedly evenhanded, even when dealing with polarizing events like the Hollywood blacklist and the Zoot Suit riots. He concludes the book with a guarded endorsement of the notion that California is “a place, a society, in which the possibilities of the American experiment can be struggled for and sometimes achieved.” But on the road to this conclusion, Mr. Starr does not hesitate to explore the many dark corners of the state’s history. In fact, if there is one guiding theme in “California: A History,” it is that the very magnitude of California’s possibilities frequently makes its inhabitants look petty and vicious by comparison.

That magnitude is, first of all, physical: California is an enormous state, encompassing coastal plains, forests, deserts, and mountain ranges. This variety gives the state a kind of geographic self-sufficiency, making it symbolically appropriate that its first European discoverers believed it actually was an island. In 1533, sailing westward from recently conquered Mexico, Spanish explorers found the narrow peninsula of what is now Baja California and named it after a fictional country in a popular Spanish romance, “an island on the right hand of the Indies … very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise.” Not until six years later did the Spanish discover that California was connected to the mainland.

For a very long time, however, California remained functionally an island, cut off from the south by desert and hostile Native Americans, and from the east by the Sierra Nevada mountains. Though nominally under Spanish sovereignty, it was barely penetrated by Europeans until the 1770s, and then on a very small scale. During the years of the American Revolution, Father Junipero Serra led the expedition of soldiers and Franciscan priests that established the famous chain of missions up the California coast. The missions provided the nuclei of what would later become San Francisco and Los Angeles, and laid the groundwork for a potent romantic myth of Mission California. But as Mr. Starr shows, they remained tiny colonies, thoroughly rejected by the Native Americans they were meant to convert. By the time California became a province of independent Mexico, in 1821, its European population was no more than 7,000.

This left California ripe for the plucking by the expanding United States, which duly plucked it in a series of shady maneuvers that Mr. Starr compares to a comic opera. The territory was conquered in 1846, by an improbably tiny band of American soldiers, settlers, and adventurers, and was admitted to the union as a state in 1850. In that short interim, California had already received its first massive wave of American settlers, thanks to the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill. In the ensuing Gold Rush, the state’s population exploded from less than 10,000 in 1848 to more than 250,000 three years later.

From this point onward, “California” accelerates at the same breakneck pace as California itself. As Mr. Starr moves quickly through the 20th century – including the San Francisco quake of 1906, the labor unrest of the 1930s, the aerospace boom of the war years, the rise of the counterculture in the 1960s – we see California become more and more the state we know today. But to a surprising extent, the pattern of the earliest years continues to hold. As early as the Gold Rush, Mr. Starr suggests, the DNA of the state was created: the gambler’s mentality, the voracious exploitation of nature, along with freedom from social constraints and a fraught multiculturalism. “California” is a perfect introduction for anyone who wants to read that code, which more and more looks like the blueprint for America’s future.

akirsch@nysun.com