Cheryl Anne Stapp

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

A partial view of the former Rancho Refugio's 12,147 acres For practical reasons, the newly-minted United States of America adopted British common law, a legal system based on precedent and judicial decisions. One characteristic of common law was the tradition of primogeniture—the right of succession of the eldest son. Another was that married women were not recognized as “persons” in their own right, qualified to own property or anything else. Upon marriage, a woman became h

Every California schoolchild learns of the hundreds of pioneers, seeking a better life for their families, who came overland in covered...

The brig Pilgrim at Santa Barbara California’s hide and tallow trade was big business from the early 1820s through the mid-1840s....

Hall Jackson Kelley Dozens of foreigners, mostly men, entered California in the mid-1830s. In the main they were fur trappers, shipping...

He knew, when he volunteered to act as courier, that his mission would be a dangerous, wild ride. The assignment: to deliver a message...

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...

A dark-eyed beauty, Francisca Carrillo was born in San Diego when California was still a province of Imperial Spain, and raised in the...

The Mexican-American War came to Pacific shores in July 1846, when U. S. Navy warships invaded the seaports at Monterey and San Francisco...

His namesakes are Stanislaus County, and the Stanislaus River. He was Chief Estanislao, famous for leading bands of armed Native...

Families who trundled overland in covered wagons during the 1840s, hoping to build a better life in the West, didn’t always know to be...

In centuries past, and as global knowledge expanded in the Age of Sail, any attractive land that was scantily occupied and poorly...

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...

Yet another new governor—in fact the sixth governor that authorities in Mexico City had appointed since 1822—arrived at Monterey, the...

In the Age of Sail, not everyone who entered California’s harbors came to settle. In the early 1820s, the ships of many nations began...

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

California’s north-south cultural split began as early as 1821, the year Mexico won its independence from Spain and acquired the province...

In August 1839, after several days of sailing upstream on the Sacramento River, a Swiss citizen named John Sutter arrived in the...

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