Cheryl Anne Stapp

Hubert Howe Bancroft is one of the most famous names in western America, as the man who became one of the first important and respected...

There were no animals of any kind on the rocky island when explorer Sebastian Vizcaino stopped there in 1602, naming it Santa Catalina in...

California suffered its first painful economic readjustment in the mid-1850s, although the many reasons for it were not readily apparent...

Since the 1890s, California law enforcement agencies had employed women in caretaker positions—as matrons, supervisors, and other...

A woman born and raised amid the lush landscapes of 19th century Mississippi seems an unlikely candidate as a conservationist of...

Harriet Russell Strong was a brilliant woman who overcame personal heartbreak and financial catastrophe to become an agriculturist, a...

Elizabeth Follansbee was the first woman to be a member of the faculty at a medical school in California, also the first woman admitted...

Clara Shortridge Foltz never went to law school, yet she passed the California bar exam in September 1878, after studying law in the...

Its official name was The Central Overland California and Pike’s Peak Express Company, but that was too unwieldy, so everyone just called...

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

Thousands of people poured into California during the 1850s: gold miners, merchants, farmers, families, professionals and tradesmen of...

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

Famed explorer John Charles Frémont, the leader of several U.S. Army Topographical Corps mapping expeditions across the West, gave the...

Dueling was outlawed in California at its pre-statehood Constitutional Convention in the fall of 1849. However, the penalty imposed for...

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...

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...

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...

Elizabeth Thorn Scott Flood was the capable, determined 19th century woman who paved the way for desegregated education for children of...

San Francisco’s First Unitarian Church congregation gaped at its new pastor with a mix of curiosity and consternation. Could this small,...

By 1884 California was leading the nation in educational innovations with its system of pre-grammar-school schools, based on ideas...