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The Western States ultramarathon, a yearly act of insanity in the northern Sierra Nevada, began in the 1950s as an endurance horse ride in which competitors had to traverse the equivalent of nearly four marathons along murderous terrain from Lake Tahoe to the foothills town of Auburn in less than 24 hours. Then in 1974, a shaggy-haired…

Pictured below is Judith Love Cohen, a pioneering aerospace engineer, posing with a satellite at Space Technology Laboratories in Redondo Beach in 1959. Gifted in math from a young age, Cohen recalled a high school counselor once telling her, “You know, Judy, I think you ought to go to a nice finishing school and learn to be…

Believe it or not, the hassle of parallel parking was solved more than 80 years ago. In 1938, an energetic Bay Area lumberman named Brooks Walker patented a device that would drop a wheel perpendicular to the others from the trunk of a car, allowing it to swivel in and out of tight parking spaces.…

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,…

Edward Carter, a war hero who loved his country more than it loved him, was born in Los Angeles in May 1916, a son of missionaries, a Black father and an Indian mother who gave the boy a worldly upbringing. He spent much of his childhood in India and China, where he learned to speak…

In May of 1908, a mere handshake landed a man in Alcatraz. William Buwalda’s trouble began when he attended a lecture on patriotism in San Francisco by the anarchist Emma Goldman. After her remarks, Buwalda, an Army private in uniform, walked to the stage and shook Goldman’s hand. The gesture, according to witnesses, electrified the…

When the Bay Area sculptor Michael Heizer saw a 340-ton boulder at a quarry outside Riverside, he phoned Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Heizer said it was the most beautiful rock he’d ever seen, proposing that it be displayed at the museum. Govan loved the idea. After five…

The bark of one of California’s biggest sequoias was once displayed in the shape of a tree for the amusement of Londoners. Fortune seekers lured to California by the Gold Rush discovered another opportunity in the grandeur of the Sierra’s ancient redwoods. In 1854, they peeled 90 tons of the shaggy bark from a 2,500-year-old…

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…

Every day over Los Angeles, small planes circle the skies dropping sterilized male flies to combat invasive Mediterranean fruit flies. You can see their symmetrical flight patterns in flight trackers, like the one depicted below. In the 1980s, when Medfly outbreaks threatened California’s agricultural industry, officials authorized widespread aerial spraying of malathion. The insecticide shattered the…

In 1938, Sanora Babb, a struggling journalist from Oklahoma, found a job with the Farm Security Administration helping Dust Bowl migrants in California’s Central Valley. She traveled with her supervisor, Tom Collins, from camp to camp, checking in on migrants and taking detailed notes about their lives. She was amazed by their resilience: “How brave…

When San Francisco trembled for 42 seconds on April 18, 1906, nearly two decades had passed since George Eastman introduced his first Kodak camera. In the days that followed the great earthquake, so many photographers choked the streets that a local newsman remarked: “Never since cameras were first invented has there been such a large…

One morning in 1966, motorists discovered that a 60-foot-tall painting of a nude woman had been added above a tunnel along Malibu Canyon Road. The origins of the “Pink Lady” of Malibu, pictured above, were a mystery. But as word spread, many people, including newspaper columnists and art lovers, were smitten by the guerrilla painting.…

For part of the 20th century, a common pronunciation of Los Angeles used a hard G, as in “dangle” or “sangria.” Various pronunciations of the city had been competing for prominence since its founding in 1781. In the early 1900s, the Los Angeles Times felt so strongly about the correctness of a Spanish pronunciation that…

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…

It may be hard to believe, but 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 majority of California’s residents lived in Northern California, where the Gold Rush city of San Francisco hosted…