Cheryl Anne Stapp

Christmas was not widely celebrated in our Thirteen Colonies before the 1775-1783 American Revolution, and afterward the holiday fell...

On October 3, 1863, following a Union Army victory at Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln announced to “the whole American people…in...

When the only machines were a woman’s hands and arms, and washtubs were filled with hand-drawn buckets of well or creek water instead of...

This week marks the 109th anniversary of the election that awarded California women the right to vote…though initially, it appeared that...

Today, commercial mills are complex, high-tech installations. Long ago, however, skilled artisans hand-carved granite millstones into...

Gold is probably the oldest precious metal known to mankind, and over the course of history has been the cause of countless bitter...

The bedazzled gold-rushers who swarmed into California in 1849 soon complained of many things—inflated prices, low-quality foodstuffs,...

As legend has it, the martini was invented for hard-fisted California gold miners in 1849, only back then it was called a “Martinez.”...

The gold-fevered young men who swarmed into California expecting to get rich quick, soon discovered that finding their fortune wasn’t so...

The thousands of greenhorn gold rushers who invaded California in 1849 were quickly followed by those who came to “fleece” the miners of...

For twenty years southern California had poured money, and millions of printed brochures, into a publicity campaign to attract settlers...

It is still called Bullion Bend. It is a stretch of curving old stage road that once continued on from Placerville, California to Carson...

The wanna-be rich-quick gold prospectors who swarmed into California hoping— but failing— to find an easy fortune, boosted the folklore...

Horse thieves harassed Californians for well over 100 years. Horse stealing began in the late 18th century, when Spanish missionaries and...

New Yorker Billy Mulligan and his gang of young toughs came west with the California Gold Rush, arriving in San Francisco by ship in late...

Best known for her work on the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, Julia Morgan designed more than 700 buildings after becoming, in 1904, the...

She was tiny—less than five feet tall—but determined and confident. In April 1868, she married tall John Bidwell, a prominent California...

Little Lotta Crabtree— a red-haired, merry-eyed child blessed with an irrepressible laugh— became a box office attraction in gold rush...

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...

Owney may have been just a dog, but 19th century newspapers across the nation delighted in reporting his world-traveling odyssey as if he...