Posts by Mike McPhate

In the early 1900s, few Californians could swim, let alone surf. So when a Hawaiian named George Freeth performed surfing demonstrations at Venice Beach in 1907, spectators were mesmerized by the man who could dance on the waves. Born in 1883 in Waikiki to a Native Hawaiian mother and English father, Freeth fell under the…

Charles Cushman, a voracious traveler from small-town Indiana, was an early adopter of color photography. Never without his Contax IIA viewfinder camera, he shot seemingly everything that caught his eye — people, landscapes, city streets — while taking meticulous notes on each photograph. Over a period from 1938 to 1969 he amassed more than 14,500 Kodachrome color…

When fears spread about the solvency of Silicon Valley Bank on March 9, depositors withdrew $42 billion in a single day. Scholars marveled at the swiftness of the bank run, which was turbocharged by mobile phones and social media. Not long ago, bank runs unfolded only after days or weeks of reports disseminated via television and radio.…

Many California towns can trace their origins to the discovery of some precious mineral. In Yreka, the moment was captured in a photograph. The daguerreotype above shows the mule-train packer Abraham Thompson, left, and two partners in March 1851, shortly after he spotted something glistening in the grass where his mules were eating just south of…

Fly above California’s Central Valley and a vast earth-toned checkerboard spreads out below. The fertile plain — as big as Tennessee and bathed in sunlight 300 days a year — yields a third of the produce grown in the United States. In his book “Coast of Dreams,” the historian Kevin Starr described the birth of the irrigated…

For most Californians, an outing to see the spring wildflowers involves driving an hour or two to preserves in the valleys, deserts, or foothills. But the flowers used to be everywhere. In 1847, the soldier Joseph Revere provided one of the earliest descriptions of the vast bloom within the Los Angeles basin: “In the plain itself,” he…

☝️ If you spot a large tree in San Diego’s Balboa Park, there’s a good chance it was planted by this woman. The pioneer botanist Kate Sessions finalized a deal with San Diego on this week in 1892 to lease a plot of city parkland for a nursery. In exchange, she agreed to plant 100…

Jackie Robinson, who emerged from a small house on Pepper Street in Pasadena to become an American icon, was born this week in 1919. Before he broke baseball’s color barrier, Robinson was an Army second lieutenant at Camp Hood in Texas. As recounted in “Jackie Robinson: A Biography,” on the evening of July 6, 1944,…

About 50 simple white crosses line a dusty road leading to a military post in the Mojave Desert. They’re not for soldiers killed in combat, but motorists who died in crashes along the 31-mile Fort Irwin Road linking the Barstow area and Fort Irwin National Training Center. The accidents have been blamed on the design of the…

Search for “Agua Caliente tribal reservation” in Google Maps, and you’ll see a bizarre checkerboard design draped across Southern California’s Coachella Valley, pictured below. It’s not an error. The borders of the Agua Caliente reservation emerged as a byproduct of America’s westward expansion in the 19th century and the technological innovation that facilitated it: the railroad.…

For one beautiful day nearly 50 years ago, bicyclists had a freeway in San Diego all to themselves. Before opening a new section of Interstate 805 to vehicle traffic, highway officials invited bicyclists for a Community Cycle Day along 7 miles of roadway on March 19, 1972. According to news accounts from the time, they…

Oliver Sipple was an accidental hero. On a Monday afternoon in September 1975, he happened to be standing next to Sara Jane Moore, a would-be assassin, as she pulled a .38 revolver from her purse and pointed it at President Gerald Ford outside San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel. A Vietnam veteran, Sipple grabbed Moore’s arm…

John Wooden, the quintessential American coach, arrived at UC Los Angeles in 1948 to take over a little-known basketball program that played in a cramped gym. He left in 1975, having transformed the Bruins into a powerhouse with 10 national championships. Wooden was said to be as conversant in Shakespeare and the Bible as basketball,…

In 1971, the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency announced a groundbreaking photo project designed as a “visual baseline” against which to measure progress on cleaning up our air, land, and water. Over the next six years, about 100 freelance photographers fanned out across all 50 states for the Documerica series, capturing the environmental toll of…