ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the idea of history that, quite paradoxically, rests on freedom from history. It discusses the origins of the idea, dating back to the European settlement of North America, which explain the fact that the concept of history as freedom from history must be understood as an attempt to break free from Europe and its ideas of what constitutes history. The impossibility of escaping a history understood in terms of a clean break from the past is one problem with the dominant discourse of California’s history; another is its presentation in terms of natural phenomena, portraying historical events as biological or organic. The stories present conflicting narratives; their coexistence is precluded by the inherent idea of beginnings as singular events of history. History as loss is a particularly dystopian idea of history, as it is narrated after the exhaustion of all possibilities.
