Cheryl Anne Stapp

What are you thankful for?   A week from tomorrow, we will celebrate our national Thanksgiving Day, officially proclaimed as such by President Lincoln in 1863. Prior to that, each region, mainly in New England and other northern states, had sporadically, and at different times, observed days of feasting and merriment after the autumnal harvests.   Before California became a state of the Union, even before its production of vegetables and grains amounted to much, its residents

The L a Brea Tar Pits (foreground) with the Pavilion for Japanese Art beyond, in Hancock Park, in Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile district. Photo by Joe Mabel   The City of Los Angeles boasts many ritzy districts. One of them is a genteel, affluent residential neighborhood developed in the 1920s, about six miles east of today’s downtown skyscrapers; a neighborhood of luxurious homes featuring sundry distinctive architectural styles. Historically, its well-preserved mansions sit o

View of hiking trail & Griffith Observatory, downtown Los Angeles in the distance. Photo by Brian Schmidt Sprawled over 4,310 acres, for...

Enjoying wine at a family gathering in Anaheim c. 1860   Nowadays we think of it as the home of the Magic Kingdom, the place where...

In California, and probably much of the nation, the 1880 Christmas season was a welcome return to the norm of years past. Said the...

Christmas Day 1870 was a bit unusual, in that it could be celebrated on either one of two days (or both, according to individual whim)....

Frontiersman Christopher “Kit” Carson—a legend in his own lifetime— was in California several times during its Mexican period, as a...

No one really knows who Peter Lebeck was, but we do know that he died in the wilds of the Tehachapi Mountains, the victim of a grizzly...

For eons, an ancient stream slowly carved a canyon through land that fronted on the Pacific Ocean, in the process steadily creating what...

A number of modern structures in California’s southland bear the name of a family who settled there in the long-ago days when the Spanish...

During the centuries it belonged to Spain, and the few decades it was a province of Mexico, California had no homestead laws that gave...

In the aftermath of the Mexican-American War, California existed in a state of political limbo. The peace treaty, signed in February 1848...

Over the centuries many flags have flown over California soil: the flags of nations, explorers, military units, trading companies…even a...

California’s odd shape permits its northern port city of Eureka to be the most westward city in the continental United States—yet its...

California’s southern border was resolved in 1848 by international treaty after the Mexican-American War, but until 1849 its northern...

Perched on a sheltered cove in San Francisco Bay, the little hamlet known as Yerba Buena (good herb) had been so named by the Spanish...

Friday January 24, 2020, will be the 172nd anniversary of the gold discovery in California. On a crisp winter day in 1848, a carpenter...