Cheryl Anne Stapp
Susceptible to Seizure
In centuries past, and as global knowledge expanded in the Age of Sail, any attractive land that was scantily occupied and poorly...
California's Olden Golden Days
Search
Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Aug 31
- 4 min
Cement Craze
Thousands of people poured into California during the 1850s: gold miners, merchants, farmers, families, professionals and tradesmen of...
1 view0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Aug 17
- 3 min
A Good Man
Yet another new governor—in fact the sixth governor that authorities in Mexico City had appointed since 1822—arrived at Monterey, the...
2 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Jul 20
- 2 min
A Spectacular Gateway
Famed explorer John Charles Frémont, the leader of several U.S. Army Topographical Corps mapping expeditions across the West, gave the...
3 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Jul 13
- 5 min
Affair of Honor
Dueling was outlawed in California at its pre-statehood Constitutional Convention in the fall of 1849. However, the penalty imposed for...
3 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Apr 19
- 3 min
Serving California by Sea
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...
0 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Apr 13
- 3 min
Pony Brings News of Ft. Sumter
By April 1861, California had been a state of the Union for only ten and a half years. As yet, no telegraph lines connected it with the...
1 view0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Mar 30
- 4 min
A Remarkable Life
She was a woman of remarkable qualities; a woman who rose from being an uneducated young bride going west in a covered wagon in 1844, to...
4 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Mar 16
- 2 min
Her Fight for Education
Elizabeth Thorn Scott Flood was the capable, determined 19th century woman who paved the way for desegregated education for children of...
1 view0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Feb 23
- 3 min
Rev. Thomas Starr King
San Francisco’s First Unitarian Church congregation gaped at its new pastor with a mix of curiosity and consternation. Could this small,...
4 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Feb 9
- 3 min
The Kindergarten Movement
By 1884 California was leading the nation in educational innovations with its system of pre-grammar-school schools, based on ideas...
8 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Nov 10, 2021
- 3 min
Land Laws: Land Grants vs. Homesteads
During the centuries it belonged to Spain, and the few decades it was a province of Mexico, California had no homestead laws that gave...
11 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Nov 3, 2021
- 3 min
Early & Ongoing Partition Troubles
California’s north-south cultural split began as early as 1821, the year Mexico won its independence from Spain and acquired the province...
5 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Sep 8, 2021
- 3 min
Creating California's Counties
In the aftermath of the Mexican-American War, California existed in a state of political limbo. The peace treaty, signed in February 1848...
7 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Aug 4, 2021
- 2 min
Invasion at Monterey!
In 1818, California was still an outlying province of Imperial Spain, even as New Spain (later, the Republic of Mexico) and other...
5 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Jul 14, 2021
- 1 min
Protecting the West in the Civil War
As Civil War hostilities rapidly escalated in July 1861—and United States Army personnel stationed in California left for eastern...
1 view0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Apr 21, 2021
- 4 min
The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake
One hundred fifteen years ago last Sunday, on April 18, 1906—a Wednesday—a devastating earthquake struck the northern coast of California...
2 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Apr 7, 2021
- 2 min
Mapping the West
When explorer John Charles Frémont and his exhausted company of U. S. Topographical Corpsmen reached the Sacramento Valley trading post...
3 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Mar 10, 2021
- 3 min
Rachel Larkin, Diplomat's Wife
Twenty-four–year-old Rachel Hobson Holmes boarded the trading vessel Newcastle out of Boston in September 1831. She was sailing for...
93 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
- Mar 3, 2021
- 3 min
Reformer Eliza Farnham
In her own lifetime Eliza Farnham was nationally known as an author, and as an exceptional woman on the leading edge of several social...
58 views0 comments