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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…

Before the iPhone, there was the Tel-A-Chair. A variation of the coin-operated televisions common in hotel rooms, the Tel-A-Chair was invented in 1969 by John Rice, a Sacramento tinkerer who was struck by inspiration during a three-hour wait at the Los Angeles Airport. “You can only eat so much pie and ice cream so we wandered…

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…

At the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, nearly 20,000 refugees were brought to Southern California’s Camp Pendleton. Many resettled a little ways up the coast in northern Orange County, forming what would become the largest Vietnamese enclave in the United States. Little Saigon, straddling Westminster and Garden Grove, was a place of hope and reinvention.…

Viewed from the sky, strange cleavages appear along the urban fabric of Los Angeles and San Francisco, like the image above, of a former Southern Pacific rail line arching through the Mission District in San Francisco. (See in Google Maps. More on this route: Nesssoftware.com) They’re the result of long-lost rail lines, a sort of architectural…

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…

Laguna Beach began the 1960s as a sleepy arts colony. As the hippie counterculture arose, the city’s gorgeous setting and dirt-cheap beach living made it a natural hub for the movement. Hare Krishnas moved into town. Gay people found sanctuary. Art and drugs abounded. Then, on Christmas Day of 1970, the city hosted what was billed as…

Dave Brubeck, born in the Bay Area in 1920, was a wildly popular jazz pianist in the 1950s and 60s, best known for his jaunty, oddly-metered song “Take Five,” included on the first jazz album to ever sell a million copies. Brubeck, a white man, recognized that his success stood in contrast to that of…

In 1900, San Francisco witnessed the deadliest spectator disaster in the history of American sports. The Cal and Stanford football clubs had the 10th meeting of their storied rivalry on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 29, at San Francisco’s old Recreation Park, drawing roughly 19,000 fans. Unable to get inside, hundreds of boys and men clambered atop…

On a quiet hill in east Oakland, a memorial honors a megalomaniac who orchestrated the deaths of more than 900 people. On Nov. 18, 1978, the preacher Jim Jones coerced his followers to drink cyanide-laced punch at his Guyana compound. Bereaved family members retrieved the remains of roughly half of the victims. But many others…

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.…

Colorado’s greatest champion is memorialized on a rocky shore at Monterey Bay. John Denver became a folk music hero in the early 1970s with earnest songs about the pleasures of nature at a time of war and rising cynicism. He lived for much of his life in Colorado, a state whose soaring wilderness became a theme in…

In October 1920, Maria Moreno was born to an itinerant Mexican minister and an Apache tribeswoman in rural Texas. She grew up working on a farm and went on to raise hell — in addition to 12 children — becoming the nation’s first female farmworker hired as a union organizer. Moreno didn’t play nice with…

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…

Cary Grant, a leading man of Hollywood’s Golden Age, dropped LSD more than 100 times in his later years. The sessions were conducted under a therapist’s care at a time when a group of Los Angeles psychiatrists became convinced that the drug was a tool that could change lives. Grant endured an appalling childhood. His…