Cheryl Anne Stapp

Getty Images Some would have celebrated quietly, of course; but New Year’s Eve December 31, 1925, was a bash for everyone in the Golden State who wanted to party hearty, despite Prohibition. The 18th Amendment was the law of the land; yet with several California counties defiantly “wet,” a thriving underground scene of speakeasies and private house parties characterized the holiday’s revelry.    Too, nineteen-twenty-five was mid-decade of the Roaring Twenties, an era known fo

Christmas will be here a week from tomorrow, celebrated with loved ones and good cheer despite all the tribulations of our modern times. As Christmas 1852 rolled around, the impact of the California Gold Rush—good and bad elements alike—was still a monumental social and economic influence, even though the invasive swarms of gold-fevered opportunists from all over the world had commenced four full years earlier.   California had been admitted to the Union two years past, but t

As busy as they were at establishing 21 missions, the Franciscan priests sent to California in 1769 by a Spanish king, still found time to teach the native Indians to play the lute, violin, trumpet, metal triangle, and to sing Christmas carols in Spanish. At Mission San Jose and possibly other missions as well, Indian neophytes enacted a church play at Christmastime. Under Mexican rule, secularization of those missions—which began in 1834—disrupted ordinary customs that had b

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...