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“It’s really where California began.” Few places teem with so much California history as Monterey. It’s where the drafting and adoption of the state’s first constitution was hosted in 1849. It’s where the American flag was first raised in California in 1846. And it’s where the Spanish explorer Sebastian Vizcaino arrived in December 1602, inspiring the European colonization…

Jim Morrison, Lizard King of Venice Beach, represented an outburst of individualism not only across society, but within his own family. His father, George Morrison, a Navy rear admiral and veteran of three wars, was mystified by the long-haired poet in leather pants. He urged him to abandon music, citing “a complete lack of talent.” The rebuke…

Charles Schulz, who spent much of his life in Santa Rosa, created a childhood world for Charlie Brown and the gang that became among the most influential comic strips in history, with more than 355 million daily readers worldwide. But one element of the strip always bothered Schulz. He hated the name. “Peanuts” was chosen…

In November 1978 Leo Ryan, a U.S. congressman from California, was murdered along with four others on a remote airstrip in Guyana. Ryan had traveled there to follow up on concerns from his constituents that their family members were being sexually and mentally abused at the People’s Temple compound led by the Rev. Jim Jones.…

The General Sherman, a giant sequoia in California’s southern Sierra Nevada, is as wide as a three-lane highway, nearly as tall as the Statue of Liberty, and older than Christ. It’s the champion of big trees, recognized as such for decades by American Forests, a nonprofit that has been ranking the world’s biggest trees since…

In November 1913, water began pouring through the Los Angeles Aqueduct, making the city of Los Angeles as we know it possible. As social critic David Ulin recounted, photographs from the dedication ceremony in Sylmar captured “the apotheosis of the city’s creation myth.” One shot shows the water gushing into the waiting San Fernando Reservoir, a…

On Sept. 30, 1955, a Ford sedan collided with a Porsche Spyder 550 on a lonely stretch of highway in Central California, killing a young James Dean. The crash was the earthly end of the 24-year-old star, but the beginning of his enduring legend. Dean only starred in three films. At the time of his…

Long before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Iberian explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo set off from Mexico in a bid to confirm long-told myths of a paradise abounding in gold at the edge of the known world. After three months at sea, he found it. In September of 1542 Cabrillo’s fleet of three ships became the…

Over the centuries, hundreds of ships have been swallowed in the maw of California’s jagged coast. It was in early September of 1923 that one of the worst disasters unfolded as seven U.S. Navy destroyers ran aground along the Santa Barbara County coast. Twenty-three sailors lost their lives. The ships were convoying in a column from San…

In September of 1878 the force of nature known as Clara Foltz passed the California bar, becoming the first female lawyer on the West Coast. The firsts didn’t stop there. Foltz was the first woman to serve as clerk of the state Assembly’s judiciary committee, the first woman deputy district attorney in the country, and…

Biddy Mason was brought to California as a slave in 1851. Then she became one of Los Angeles’ wealthiest women. Mason was born on Aug. 15, 1818, most likely in Hancock County, Georgia. As a young woman she was enslaved by a Mississippi farmer named Robert Smith, a convert to Mormonism who joined his church’s…

California’s first newspaper was published in Monterey in August of 1846. Shortly after American forces seized the port city, the weekly Californian was founded by Walter Colton, the administrative leader of Monterey, and Robert Semple, a frontiersman from Kentucky. The local population didn’t exceed 1,000 souls at the time, and the newspapermen had to rely…

The owner of the California property where gold was discovered died broke. Swiss pioneer John Sutter arrived near the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers on this week in 1839. He built a fort, persuaded the Mexican governor to grant him a massive expanse of land, and made plans to construct a city. Needing lumber,…

California is a land of white sand beaches and glistening granite peaks, but also of incinerated forests and dessicated hillsides. It’s this second California that has drawn the eye of the Thomas Heinser. For five years or so, the German-born, San Francisco-based photographer has made a study of the state’s scarred landscapes. His images, shot…

For a brief period before the Gold Rush, San Francisco was largely a Mormon town. It was on this week in 1846 that the ship Brooklyn landed at San Francisco, then Yerba Buena. It carried 238 weary Mormons who had completed an epic journey from New York, five times farther than that of the Plymouth…

In 2013, a couple was out walking the dog on their rural Northern California property when they spotted a tin can peeking out from the dirt. Inside it, and seven other cans, they found more than $10 million worth of pristine 19th-century gold coins. It was the largest discovery of buried gold coins ever recorded…

In the early 1990s, Southern California authorities dumped thousands of immigrant orphans into Tijuana. Waves of Mexican children had streamed across the border into California, many in flight from abuse and poverty, creating a small army of street children that took root under freeways and in parking lots. Many resorted to stealing, peddling drugs, and…

A century ago, Malibu was one family’s personal playground. The heiress of the Spanish land grant that included Malibu grew up hiking, horseback riding, and boating. She later married the ranch foreman and built a Spanish-style mansion by the sea that would become regarded as one of California’s most exquisite homes. Over time, the family was…