In 2006 he was presented a National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush for his work as a scholar and historian, and in 2010 was inducted into the California Hall of Fame.

Five years later, he and his brother were reunited with their mother, where they lived in a public housing project in San Francisco, while they subsisted on welfare.

The 4/68 Armor Bn was assigned to the 3rd Brigade, 8th Infantry Division and was located at Coleman Barracks near Mannheim in West Germany.

[3] He was also appointed city librarian, during which time he earned a master's degree in library science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1974.

In one column, he described himself as “a conservative neo-Thomist Roman Catholic with Platonist leanings and occasional temptations towards anarchy.” He opposed what he called San Francisco's "rigid inquisitorial orthodoxy," which he identified with the city's Democratic leadership, and defended Proposition 13, which capped increases in property tax rates.

In one speech, San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk referred to Starr as a bigot and grouped him with anti-gay activists.

After leaving the Examiner and running unsuccessfully for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Starr tempered his political views and refashioned his public persona.

No other historian has been able to capture California's exceptionalism, its vitality and its promise in such detail and yet invest it with the immediacy and excitement of a page-turner novel.

The final volume, entitled Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, covers the period from 1950 to 1963 and won the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for history.

[10] His writing won him a Guggenheim Fellowship, membership in the Society of American Historians, and the Gold Medal of the Commonwealth Club of California.

[3] In 2006, Starr was made a member of the College of Fellows of the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, California.