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In the late 1980s, Jay Ohrberg had a dream. One of Hollywood’s top car customizers, he had built KITT from “Knight Rider,” Herbie from “Herbie the Love Bug,” and the “Back to the Future” DeLorean. Now he aimed for a place in the record books with the longest car ever built, a Cadillac limousine that stretched 100 feet,…

In the early 1990s, a California professor stunned the scientific community by reviving 45-million-year-old yeast — and using it to make beer. Raul Cano, a microbiologist at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, found the spores in the gut of an ancient bee encased in tropical amber and spread it on a growth medium to see…

In the 1950s, Angelenos would sometimes see two “sunrises” — one from the sun and another from atomic bomb tests in the Nevada desert. Between 1951 and 1962, 100 detonations were conducted above ground at the site northwest of Las Vegas, some so brilliant that they could be seen from points across the California coast. People…

In 1970, Sérgio Mendes, a Brazilian musician, employed a shaggy-haired young carpenter (above right) to build a music studio in his backyard in Encino. The worker was an aspiring actor, but had taught himself carpentry to support his young family. At the time, there was little to suggest that Harrison Ford, then 28, was destined…

Christopher Hall’s photos of parked cars around San Francisco seem drawn from some dreamy bygone era. But the scenes — a moody 1960s Ford Mustang parked outside a warehouse, a Rolls Royce in front of “Don Ramon’s” Mexican restaurant — were captured squarely in the age of Twitter and Facebook. They are not staged. Hall,…

A California airline used to operate a fleet of planes with smiley faces on their noses. They called them the Grinningbirds. Pacific Southwest Airlines, based in San Diego, was the first large discount carrier in the U.S., growing into an industry leader of intrastate flight in the 1960s and 1970s and paving the way for…

A single pine in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Palm trees adorned with strange red beacons. A trio of cacti with green hues that seem just a little bit off. Since the 1990s, disguised cell phone towers have become a staple of America’s urban environment. Unlike power and landline companies, cell phone providers cannot…

The familiar story of the Donner Party is one of misfortune, madness, and profound isolation. But archaeologists have come to believe that the Midwestern migrants who became trapped in the northern Sierra during the winter of 1846-47 were not alone. While October snowfall represented a catastrophe for the pioneers’ wagon train as they crossed the…

Lockdowns, mask mandates, defiance from churches, anti-mask protests, hotels requisitioned for the poor, a devastating winter surge. California’s coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has been, in many ways, eerily similar to the influenza pandemic of 1918. As the state’s Covid-19 cases and deaths plummet, many journalists and academics have been predicting that the similarities will persist…

Half of Californians live below this red line. 👇   That may be hard to believe, but it’s more or less accurate, demographers say: Roughly 20 million people reside north of a line running through Los Angeles, and the other 20 million are squished underneath it. In the second half of the 19th century, the…

Coastal Californians scanned the skies for hours in anticipation of her arrival. At Oakland Airport, a nervous tension permeated a crowd of roughly 10,000 onlookers. “Then,” the S.F. Chronicle reported on the events of Jan. 12, 1935, “out of the veil of mist, without warning, came the plane.” Amelia Earhart’s red monoplane streaked into view…

The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti once likened San Francisco to a place that “drifts anchorless upon the ocean.” The metaphor comes to life with the city’s signature fog, which pours over the hills in slow-motion waves of white. On the ground, the experience can be dreary, “like living inside a great gray pearl,” as Herb Caen…

The Oakland painter and poet Obi Kaufmann calls to mind a tatted-up, modern day John Muir, only with half of the beard and serious watercolor skills. Like the 19-century Scotsman, Kaufmann has become recognized for his explorations of California’s natural world in so-called “field atlases” that blend graceful prose with paintings of maps and wildlife.…

In the summer of 1885, three Hawaiian princes, on break from their studies at a Bay Area military school, paddled into the ocean off Santa Cruz on 17-foot redwood planks. The strange exercise was recounted in the pages of the Santa Cruz Daily Surf: “The young Hawaiian princes were in the water, enjoying it hugely…

Along the slopes of the Sierra west of Lake Tahoe, several oddly symmetrical groups of trees rise from the middle of the forest. Shaped like wagon wheels, they are known as nelder plots and were planted in the 1990s as part of a study at the Blodgett Forest Research Station. A nelder plot at Blodgett…

Frederick Roberts is a major figure in California history whom few people have heard of. Born to a prominent businessman on this day in 1879, Roberts became the first Black graduate of Los Angeles High School. He attended USC and later worked as a school principal, mortician, and news editor. Then in 1918, at a…

Jenny Sampson, a Berkeley photographer, had been taking pictures of skateboarders for years. Then one day in early 2017, during a visit to a skate park in the Bay Area city of Emeryville, a new phenomenon caught her attention: about half a dozen young female skaters holding their own in a subculture traditionally dominated by…

Donald E. Worster is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Kansas and the author of “A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir.” Below is an essay he wrote in response to a Sierra Club initiative to reckon with comments by Muir that the group said “drew on deeply harmful racist…