The Merry Tramps of Oakland: California’s original glampers

More than a century and a quarter before the word glamping earned an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2016, a boisterous group of women were camping in style in the wildlands of California. Beginning in the 1880s, as John Muir was captivating the nation with his writings on the “inventions of God,” the…

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George Freeth, the man who brought surfing to Venice

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…

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22 photos of midcentury San Francisco in vivid color

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…

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Six days and 665 miles: Louis Remme’s amazing bank run in 1855

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.…

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How ‘something glistening in the grass’ created the city of Yreka

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…

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A lousy extinction: How Colpocephalum californici lived among (and on) the California condors

When conservationists captured all remaining California condors in a bid to save the dwindling species in the 1980s, they deloused the birds. The intervention was ultimately a success, lifting their population from just 27 wild birds to hundreds through captive breeding. But it also killed off all members of a species of louse that lived exclusively on…

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In California, the wildflowers used to be everywhere

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…

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How Kate Sessions made her mark on San Diego

☝️ 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…

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How Jackie Robinson fought racism in the Army

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,…

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The white crosses of the Mojave Desert

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…

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Steve Jobs’ sly sense of humor

L.N. Varon, a resident of Imperial Beach, was a collector of autographs, soliciting them routinely in letters to famous people. In 1983, he got an answer from Steve Jobs, who was known to be a reluctant autograph giver. His letter is pictured below, typed on stationery branded with the Apple computer letterhead and containing both the…

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How a California tribe became one of the Coachella Valley’s most powerful forces

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.…

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The bumpy tale of Plank Road

In the early 1900s, the best way to cross the desert from San Diego to Arizona was by horse. Then a local businessman named Ed Fletcher had an idea: He proposed laying wooden planks across 7 miles of soft sand, a sort of beach boardwalk without the ocean. Joseph Lippincott, a prominent civil engineer, was quoted…

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